THE TRENTON PROJECT is a documentary workshop.  Started by filmmaker Purcell Carson in 2012 as part of her Princeton University seminar, "Documentary Film and the City", we partner with Trenton residents, institutions and community organizations. We work to illuminate how cities work, how community is strengthened, how injustice is fought, and how change happens. Historian Alison Isenberg joined in 2016 to deepen our connection to Trenton's urban history and city archives. We create work with student filmmakers, researchers, and Trentonians with a wide range of rich experiences and memories. We have shown our work on the Princeton campus and in Trenton at venues including: Artworks, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mercer County Community College, The College of New Jersey and Shiloh Baptist Church. We see film as a tool of investigation, a framework for close listening, and an amplifier for the voices of a city. 

In addition to our student work, THE TRENTON PROJECT offers a framework for long-term projects. This work began in 2016, when Purcell Carson and Alison Isenberg began to look at the 1960s, the protests and violence of 1968. That collaborative research, focused on the life and of one Black college student, Harlan Joseph, who was shot and killed by a white police officer, will result in Isenberg's book, Uprisings, and Carson's film, Harlan B. Joseph Was Here. This work is the product of years of original archival research and teaching, over eighty interviews, public programming, community engagement with other oral history initiatives and an ongoing effort to create a park in Trenton in Harlan Joseph's memory. Our work is an ongoing, lived exploration of how historical research, writing, film production, digital archives, and public history cross-pollinate and inform each other. 

Another focus of THE TRENTON PROJECT looks at Central American migration to Trenton. That work has led to three cohorts of student films and a collaboration with visual anthropology students at Guatemala's University del Valle. Our 2023 screening at Westminster Presbyterian included a simultaneous screening and event for audiences and film participants in Salcajá, Guatemala. Purcell's feature documentary about the ties between Salcajá and Trenton is currently in post-production.  

Since 2012, we have been fortunate to earn the generous support of the Program in Urban Studies, the Program in Community Engaged Scholarship, the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, the History Department, the SPIA in New Jersey program at the School for Public and International Affairs, and the PACE Center. We've been honored to lead a number of cohorts of summer interns, both directly through The Trenton Project, the Darien Internship in Princeton's Program in Community Engaged Scholarship and the Aspiring Scholars and Professionals Program in the Emma Bloomberg Center. Our work on the 1960s was supported by the 250th Fund in Innovative Undergraduate Education and the Princeton Histories Fund. Alison Isenberg's book is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and Purcell Carson's work in Guatemala was funded through the Fulbright Program.