Danita Mason-Hogans, MA is an award-winning civil rights historian, educator, speaker, writer and activist and the newest member of the Advisory Board of UNC’s Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research. Danita is a native of Chapel Hill, NC from seven generations on both sides of her family. The daughter of Dave Mason of the Chapel Hill Nine, who began the first sit-in of Chapel Hill’s civil rights’ movement, igniting a decade of protests against segregation. Danita’s acclaimed TEDx Talk “Why the Way We Tell Stories is A Social Justice Issue” was featured on TED where she describes the Critical Oral History methodology, which she uses for her podcast RE/Collecting Chapel Hill. Working with community partners, school systems, universities, activists and historians, she collaborates and consults to document local and national history from the “inside out” and from the “bottom up.”