This section of the guide is yet to be fleshed out. My suggestions are currently all for onsite projects, given that little of the Barnard collection is available digitally. I hope that people who have done or are considering teaching S&F IX will contribute their projects and ideas by emailing me directly or filling out the feedback form.
Bring your class to the Barnard Archives (arrange a visit with the Barnard archivists)
- introduce students to the collection, finding aid, and document boxes
- direct students to select a document from the conference holdings
- assign students to write a blog post about their process, noting what they expected to find, what they found, and what they didn't find
inspired by Wendy Hayden, who references work by Tom Keegan and Kelly McElroy
Other ideas:
- Challenge students to identify as one of the conference participants or protestors and how they might read and respond to the archive
- Invite students to imagine what might be held in an archive of a local event, or even the class and to explore what might or might not represent the event or class in forty years
- Compare and contrast the holdings at Barnard to the holdings at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and theorize the similarities and differences
- Contextualize the S&F IX materials with contemporaneous items from the Digital Collections
- Explore how college administrators might have navigated the protests and diary confiscation knowing what we do now
- Examine another controversy at Barnard or at another college and consider how administration should handle it looking back from an imagined forty years in the future
- Observe who may and may not have contributed materials to the collection and what identities they hold
- Make a conference diary for another project or for the class--could be a final project
- Choose an item to digitize. Think through issues of description and metadata, intellectual property, feminist ethics of care, and other archives concerns.
- Develop a description and indexing project using the off our backs letters to the editor, which is where much of the post-conference discussion--and animosity--flourished.
