GSJ 598/ DH 530 - CoE Archives

Course: GSJ 598/DH 530 Special Topics - Building Intersectional Feminist Archives with instructor Deb Verhoeven (Summer 2023)

Who was your community partner, and can you describe the project objectives?

Our group was paired with the City of Edmonton Archives and was tasked with activating an existing archive through an online exhibit. For our project, there wasn't any stipulation as to what the exhibit would look like or what it needed to contain, but we were privileged to be able to use material from the Karen Rowswell collection (MS 1210) to create our exhibit. The collection contained several items which reflected feminist activities on the University of Alberta campus. These highlighted the intersection between feminist thought and action and the spread of a more general anti-authoritarian sentiment present from the late 1960s and into the 1980s. Our project was to build an exhibit around an existing archive, so our task was to add on a layer of interpretation. Our project was less about metadata and organizing and more about exhibition. While the other groups worked on building an actual archive by arranging and adding structure to a collection by creating metadata, we combined through our archives, looked for common threads, and built a story.

What was the biggest takeaway from your CSL placement?

The whole process was illuminating. It added a whole new dimension to our intellectual and emotional approaches to our personal and professional interactions. Not only was the subject of the exhibit about feminism, but we also approached the construction process from a feminist perspective. We started by identifying a set of values for how we would proceed, which set the tone for the way we worked and what we made. We will be able to apply this in most work situations. The practical experience of using real data and creating a final project that has meaning for the community is a great feeling. The technical skills are applicable in future employment, and the opportunity to apply theory in a practical way is invaluable. Not many projects have the freedom to use this kind of experimental process. Next time, it won't be experimental.

How can you apply any newly gained knowledge/skills to your future endeavors (courses/employment/volunteering)?

Each of our group members brought their own skills and knowledge gaps. Working on a team in a remote scenario was new for some members. For some, it was the process that was new, and for others, the tools were new. The whole group was challenged to adopt an intersectional feminist lens. This will be important for future work as knowledge workers move towards actively engaging with diverse groups. We have better experience in making space for diversity in information institutions. Being able to exercise our skills with a practical project involving real resources and artifacts is a unique opportunity. Because it was real data in a real-life situation, it was as close a simulation to the real world as we could get, but there were not the same stakes (e.g. loss of a job), so we were able to experiment and expand our knowledge. Synthesizing actual materials into a final exhibit through Omeka S is something that we couldn’t get through other methods typically used in an educational setting. The skills we gained will serve us all well for any future work.