About our Learning Cluster
During the three and a half weeks of Winter Block at Soka University of America, 12 young and bright students from the queer community (or allies) departured in a journey of knowledge regarding archival research and remembering queer voices throughout the past centuries and in the contemporary era. All of that being guided by a beautiful and funny expert in the field, Professor Ryan A. Caldwell.
In the first week, questions such as how archives are defined and conceived, the reason for archives to exist, who archives and WHO is archived were discussed. In the second, what was brought to the table were inquiries such as “how is lived experience an archive? What is an activist archive? What does lived experience have to do with accounting for community, history, and the self?”. During the third - and last week of research - the students dived into finding answers to “What is queer failure? Who is failed? What does this mean for representation? What is queer success? What would queer success look like? What is queer time and queer space?”. For the fourth and final week, they are engaging with a material set of queer archives and collecting ethnographic stories about these archives. We will use interview skills and ethnography approaches to engage queer individual and community stories. Questions such as “What is ethnography and how does it relate to archival practices? How do I know something should be archived rather than tossed in the trash? Why does this even matter? What are these things sitting in front of me and how do I index them? How do I describe materials for a thick description?” are going to be worked on.
Diverse forms of learning tools were utilized by the professor to engage the students in a fun and light way of studying, while still maintaining academic rigor. The class watched movies, documentaries, lectures with guest speakers and got to visit the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles.
Some of the sessions featured Professor Tomas Crowder-Taraborrelli’s class in their Social Movements and Video Activism Learning Cluster. With similar inquiry subjects, this collaboration was fruitful for the two classes and students exchanged content learned in both groups.
The students finish this learning trip with a deeper understanding of queer history, archival practices, and LGBTQ+ and queer archives and their related issues, being now ready to take the next step for their academic journeys while being more knowledgeable regarding social activism and LGBTQ+ resistance. The outcomes out of the LC's final project are this blog and a podcast, meant to share our experience and findings with the rest of the Soka community. Hope you enjoy!
Navigating through our Website
In this blog, you will find 5 main tabs in our Menu:
About Us Page: You’re here! These are the basics to better understand the rest of the content published and our work as whole. Hope you don’t get lost! ;)
Posts page: Where you can find our writings describing our activities and highlights of the learning experience.
Podcast page: There you can listen to the podcast our class prepared as a final project and read a little introduction to its content.
Resources: Your go-to place for articles and books read by the class during the LC, if you feel interested in knowing more about queer archives and resistance.
Films: Finally, get to know more about the documentaries watched in our class in these brief summaries and find out where to watch them.
PS: you can always just search key terms in our search tab as well :)
After all, what are archives?
At this point you might be wondering, “well, this learning cluster is about archives, but what the heck are these things called archives at the end of the day?” and there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, at the beginning of the cluster, most of us did not know exactly what this all was about. So, let us briefly explain.
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Archives are portrayed to us in different forms and shapes; they can tell us stories of those who are no longer with us. Even YOU can be an archive. According to Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Jessica Rose, in one of the articles read for this class, At Work in the Archives:
Place-Based Research and Writing, “Archives house physical evidence of the past and offer direct links to community histories. We define archives as both (1) collections of materials related to a person, family, or organization that have continuous social and cultural value, and (2) the places in which these collections are preserved and stored for future use.” (pp. 124-125).
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Diving into archives can be a fun and interesting experience; to uncover secrets in a kind of treasure hunt about the lives of people in the past and what important things they did, who they had connections to and how they changed the world - even if in a smaller scope - regarding their context, is at least fascinating.
Now, go and have fun exploring what we prepared for you guys.
(Website design and writing by Tyler Dettloff, Mia Ionna, Carol Krein, and Gray White)