Fight the Power: Amplifying Student Histories and Decentering the Archivist

Abstract

This participant-driven session will explore methods for decentering the archivist in pursuit of empowering students to manage and preserve their own histories, within or without a traditional university archives. Three archivists from Princeton University will guide the session, briefly sharing their own attempts to collaborate with and empower the Princeton student community through the My Princeton Oral History Project. The bulk of the session will consist of a facilitated discussion with participants based on the following questions: • How can we better empower students to preserve their own histories? • How can we as archivists build trust with disenfranchised community members? • How can we effectively capture and preserve student stories while maintaining and respecting this trust? Other themes include addressing the power dynamics of traditional archival practice and collecting strategies, building cultural competencies as partners rather than administrators, identifying and addressing institutional roadblocks towards collection development change, and advocacy and outreach to students and other community members. We welcome discussion on other ways of being better partners to our community members without imposing ourselves within these communities. We also hope to hear back from participants about projects at their own institutions that model a decentered-archivist approach. We will facilitate a resource-brainstorm and report-out at the end of the session so that these ideas can be shared with the larger group. 10 minutes for presentation, 10 minutes for discussion set up, 30 minutes for discussion and breakouts for resource brainstorm (each group will focus on one topic and we’ll combine into a published resource after the conference), 10 minutes for report out and wrap up.