You may not be experiencing the positive affective rewards of all your work thus far, but I think you have done tremendously much and should take a moment to reflect on it all!
I've been paying special attention to three things in your work and in your interactions with one another: (1) the knowledge you make in your journals and reflections, whenever you develop a new lens for critique, or discover a new possibility for archival work; (2) the ethic and care with which you take stewardship of the materials you are examining; and (3) the theories you build when you let the collection speak back to what you read, and vice-versa. In all these things, I have only seen upward progress. Nicely done.
In this final unit of the course we are reading very little outside the collection -- after all, it's full steam ahead as we negotiate the remaining stages of this project. But as I reflect on how you have responded to what we have read, I realize it's time for your quiet brilliance to start getting loud. Quite frankly, I need your help thinking aloud and loudly during our remaining weeks together about these specific things:
- Each day we are in the archives, we walk a fine line between liberating the materials and putting them more under our "gaze" (and hence, making them more susceptible to our own processing errors or misjudgments, and to our own cultural erasures). Should we be okay with that? Can we be okay with that?
- You have put me on a journey toward re/discovering what it means to remain "critically distant" from our materials. But for each of you, what does that mean?
- I need some help thinking through other things about the "whiteness" of this collection and its potential for digitization, so I'll likely ask those questions directly during Thursday's class.
- I need your questions, bafflements or confusions if any are lingering about what is due in the remainder of the semester. We're moving into the crunchiest time of the semester, and while I can anticipate most of your struggles, I can never know all of them with certainty, so do start asking them soon. (As my engineering colleague likes to say, "I cannot fix what I don't know is broken.")
- A sense of how you're faring with your research component, especially if you would like more guidance beyond my comments prior to spring break. The research component is self-paced, so we have less opportunity as a class to check in with each other about our research, although next week's workshop will provide us some space for that. In the meantime, seek me out via e-mail or office hours (I also do phone- and video-conferences as needed). It is never a bad time, and I love to hear from you.
Finally, as promised I have merged what I think are all four groups' desires for the collection into a suggested arrangement, which is linked to this space. You made some smart suggestions during today's class, so I hope I did them justice. On Thursday, I'll ask for you responses and thoughts; we can also ask the same of Dean McCormick.
See you then,
-Dr. Graban
