Assignment created by Dr. Krista Grensavitch, Ph.D. and Abbi Nye, MLIS.
Overview
This semester-long, scaffolded assignment empowers students by asking them to assemble a Personal Archive (PA) that documents their experience/s during 2020, including but not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, which in this current iteration, responded to members of law enforcement murdering George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color).
Along with helping students record and critically engage with their lived reality, this assignment has several purposes:
- To help students explore what an archive is, understand how archives are political, and that archives are often the product of heteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacist institutions
- To introduce the concept of symbolic annihilation and then imagine how creating a personal archive can counter systemic forces that silence, erase, deny, and minimize
- To help students develop an understanding of intersectional analysis, utilizing it as a lens to interrogate mass movement, other, and self
- To build radical empathy, both in and out of the classroom
Introductory Materials
Introduction for Instructors – The Personal Archive Assignment
Introduction for Students – The Personal Archive Assignment
For Instructors – Assignment and Reflection Prompts for Use with Personal Archive Assignment
Sample Course Schedule for Personal Archive Assignment – 16 WK Semester
Sample Assignment Prompts
PA Prompt – Item that Communicates Experience within or of Present-Day Protest Movements
PA Prompt – Item that Communicates Experience with COVID-19
PA Prompt – Item that Communicates Experience with 2020 Election
PA Prompt – Article of Clothing
PA Prompt – Written Correspondence
PA Prompt – Self-Portrait Revisited
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