That's TMI: Time, Memory, and Interpretation

     This past week was the finale: the curtains closed, and the elevator doors heading to L1 in Chalmers shut. This led to the encore for SOCY 291 in the Archives and Special Collections classroom, with our cases' final display and presentation. Monday through Thursday of the week served me personally as a mourning period; looking through old photos and new gemstones hidden away in files while letting out sad, melodramatic sighs as I came to terms with the fact that certain items had to be scrapped and that our time set aside from class just to explore was coming to a close. Through this week of my hair serving as a mourning veil, I also personally grappled with how to even organize the case, with my desire for the chronological viewing of what was deemed as key events in Kenyon history clashing with the little voice on my shoulder compelled me to organize it in a visually engaging way to get viewers attention. Even having to decide what was “worth” displaying (without e...

Reflecting on the small exhibition on the topic of Environmentalism at Kenyon with Abby and Lily, I could not help but reflect on the process of undertaking this task. Through many meetings in which we looked again and again at different folders and boxes, parsing through an endless stream of information which we had to analyze and fit into a coherent, visually and mentally intriguing narrative, we picked a good variety of materials to construct the narrative that environmentalism has taken many forms in Kenyon’s history. From collections of pressed flowers to recycling groups and then later recycling facilities and the makings of the BFEC, it is safe to say for as long as Kenyon has existed, an interest in the environment has been present on this campus.   Yazdiha, in chapter 6 of her book “The Struggle for the People’s King, presents the notion that  collective memory is something that is subject to the whims of those who invoke it. She specifically references the femin...

With the work of remembered now performed on Kenyon's archives, I feel like our group had done a good job in creating a kind of montage of the major turning points and ongoing process of opening Kenyon up to those previously excluded from higher education. With the photos of Ballard and Jackson, Kenyon's first two Black students, it felt like we found a decent start to Kenyon's road to opening its doors to those qualified by previously excluded due to their race or sex. The later photographs of the art exhibit commemorating Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, as well as the founding documents of Adelante and photos of Lusanne Segre, the manager of Snowden house, were a great way of showing not just the firsts of the college, but ongoing effort to recognize more groups as worthy of education. I feel it created a decent narrative of how not only there were successes of inclusion, but also the specific role that students and faculty alike played in making it happen. What I feel...

  This week, our group finalized our item selection. Compared to previous weeks, we focused on constructing the meaning behind the chronological presentation of our objects. After viewing the class exhibition, I noticed some key differences between our approach and that of other groups. When other groups were presenting, most of them mentioned that they were trying to focus on capturing the key moments in the Kenyon history of their theme when selecting items. Therefore, in my opinion, their presentations have a degree of historical and factual foundation based on the assumption that the theme has made historical progress at Kenyon. This can be seen through the presentation of specific figures and specific events related to those figures. Looking back, I realize that our selection process involved a conscious attempt to highlight student responses that best represent Kenyon’s engagement with global politics from the past century to the present. After all, the approaches that differ...

If you'd told me at the start of this project that I'd walk away from it with something close to a fondness for a group project—a group project—I would've stared at you like you just suggested I major in Econ for fun. I would've collected a hefty pocketful of Middle Path pebbles and prepared to launch dramatically into the Kokosing. And yet, here I am. Admitting, in plain text, that working with Emily, Elliot, and Liv was not only functional, but—unsettlingly—fun. We were randomly assigned, and somehow, what could've easily been four people orbiting their own stress cycles turned into a well-balanced machine powered by caffeine, shared Google Docs, and the quiet, unspoken fear of being the one who forgot the meeting.  By the end of the first week, our Monday 1 p.m. meetings were locked into the schedule like we were a tiny cult of punctual archivists. We added a Wednesday or two when needed, and even threw ourselves into a pre-presentation Friday—an act of academic...

 This week, our group completed the final presentation on women's activism at Kenyon. Our group's timeline spans from 1969, when Kenyon welcomed its first female students and its first tenured female professor, to around 2000. During this period, we continuously observed female students and organizations, and, later, non-gender-specific people promoting a female-friendly environment at the school through club activities, posters, and other forms of expression. Even though we did not selectively fabricate any materials to create the illusion of continuous and active feminist activism at Kenyon, we did discover another issue: while the history of women at Kenyon is something we can be proud of, it seems to only include white women. We did not find records of activism by women of color, which is especially obvious from looking at the visual materials, it was only white women who were represented. This week, we learned three concepts of reckoning , restoration , and reconciliatio...

This week we finalized our displays in preparation for our presentation. Looking around all of the other groups’ displays and hearing them present their materials and the experiences they had working in the archive, I was struck by a couple of things. One was that I had never heard of many of the organizations whose materials my group had been looking at, whereas other groups had pulled materials and history from ones that I had heard of. Another was that other groups said that one of the hardest things about this project was the sheer amount of materials they had to look through and choose between, whereas my group kept coming up slightly empty when searching for materials that fit our theme–Kenyon student’s reactions to global politics. In chapter 6 of The Struggle for the People’s King, Hajar Yazdiha discusses restoration, reconciliation, and reckoning in the context of conflict along racial lines within the feminist movement and feminist activism. Yazdiha outlines that in order fo...

As our group approached this last week of whittling down our curation and intentionally selecting pieces for our narrative display, the irony struck me yet again of the idea of how in displaying "Identity and Inclusion" we had been tasked with making certain exclusive choices in order to fit our narrative structure. With limitations like time, resources, archival availability, and our own personal biases, at some point my group had to concede with the fact that we could only tell so many stories (and so very little of each story at that). I'm thankful to have been met with these roadblocks and challenges, it made us think critically about how stories are told and how they are remembered collectively in a way that can only be learned through tangible practice. Another obstacle was the concept of intersectionality-- how certain identity groups overlap and impact one another.  One pertinent section of our reading for Monday that stuck with me throughout the week in the archi...

     This week marked the end of our time in the archives. It has been an amazing couple weeks working on this project, and in the end, our group presented a display that we loved and were incredibly proud of. We fulfilled our three part goal: recognizing Kenyon’s important Civil War era figures, describing Kenyon’s acts of commemoration in relation to the war, and highlighting the legacy these figures and events continue to have on our campus today.      In class this week, we focused on Chapter 6 of Hajar Yazdiha’s The Struggle for the People’s King . This chapter focused on the ideas of restoration, reconciliation, and reckoning. Restoration involves bringing previously erased (whether intentionally or unintentionally) historical narratives back to the forefront of the public consciousness, and reconciliation involves altering the prevailing narrative or canon to make room for these previously forgotten events and their impacts. Through the process of re...

 This week marked our final visits to the archives, where we added the last finishing touches to our projects. My group mates and I made many trips to make adjustments and refine our work as our project had evolved and taken a new life under our modified focus. We reimagined how we would structure our timeline, discussion, and key moments. When we initially decided to shift our focus, we broke our approach into three categories: Kenyon during the war, commemoration of the war, and its presence today. These categories were instrumental in guiding our research, helping us decide where to look, what to search for, and what to prioritize, especially given our limited time. Through extensive reorganization, we were able to fit as much relevant information as possible, covering a wide range of topics with just four clear labels.  From our readings this week, we covered Yazdiha’s discussion of the importance of restoration and reconciliation when remembering and giving proper recog...

This week, our group finalized our selections for our display and discussed the historical significance of the items we selected during the Archive and Special Collection visits, but in class we discussed the intersectionality within the #MeToo movement. The items from our display that I felt most interested in related to Former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, specifically the photograph of protesters and the flyer announcing his visit. I was shocked by the protesters' audacity to crash a commencement address in order to protest the speaker, and I often wonder how audience members perceived this situation. The document about his visit explained that protesters wanted to voice their opposition to Palme's opposition to the U.S.'s policy in Vietnam.   These protesters reminded me of participants within the #HimToo movement and how they switched around the situation to make it seem like they were the victims. Yazdiha (2023:173) specifically points out Donald Trump's comm...

             This last week in the archives was filled with multiple visits to perfect our display case about Kenyon’s involvement in the Civil War. We learned about Kenyon's four key players of the Civil War: Rutherford B Hayes, Lorin Andrews, David Davis, and Edwin Stanton. Part of what gave them such importance was their role in the war, government, and the relationships they shared with Abraham Lincoln. Through looking at their files, one can see the respect and power the Kenyon College community, and the Archives gave to the voices of these 4 men. As we searched for content to add to our display case, we came across a paper written in 1961 called “LAMDA and the Civil War.” This document explains the beginning of what we now refer to as the LAMDA DKE chapter on Kenyon’s campus, their member's involvement in the Civil War, and the commotion it caused on campus. When Lorin Andrews got word of a secret society on campus, he was enraged and said t...

       This week we had our final presentations and discussion for our group projects. I found all of the presentations very interesting and I loved how each group created a cohesive narrative around their topic. One aspect of the presentations that I found particularly interesting was how I saw some major connections in the curations between the different groups. For example, The Women and Gender Activism Group and the Inclusion and Diversity group each highlighted Harlene Marley (pictured above), who was the first woman to be a tenured professor at Kenyon. I also really appreciated the Inclusion and Diversity Group's curation. It is truly such a broad topic and it was really impressive to see all of the stories they were able to tell given the limited amount of sources we were given. I also really enjoyed our final class discussion. The general consensus was that the hardest part of this project was picking specific narratives to focus on in our curations, since we...

  In our final week in the archives, my group was mostly focused on narrowing down what items from the archives we were going to display given the space limitations. We were also trying to look at our collection from the point of view of someone who hadn't spent four weeks immersed in folders and boxes about the Crozier Center, Harlene Marley, and the Coordinate College for Women. What archival pieces needed more context, and how much did we want to let our viewers draw their own conclusions about what to focus on? We also faced the task of making some kind of narrative out of the often disparate photographs, Collegian articles, and pamphlets we had chosen. After several weeks zoomed in, suddenly we had to take a step back and reflect on what we'd done. Had we really uncovered something new, or brought the archives into the canon, as Assmann would say? Or had we reproduced existing stratification about who is remembered and how? In chapter 6, "#MeToo, Black Feminism, and t...

     I discovered nothing new in the archives this week. As our final display was due by Friday, history was set. We knew every single thing there was to know about women at Kenyon and were now focusing our efforts on polishing up that narrative. My groupmates and I narrowed down our collection deciding what was best suited for the limited space "Women and Gender Activism at Kenyon" had. We prioritized photos and visuals that didn't ask too much from our viewer; we cut out interesting pieces like "Men at Kenyon" that widened our scope too much; and we formatted our collection so that each piece seamlessly fitted with the pieces around it. As opposed to other weeks which were filled with excitingly showing each other interesting findings from the archives, this week was categorized by our discussions of what may be presented to our peers and what should be returned to the archive and forgotten about. How stressful! It is a daunting task to decide who should be r...

     On Wednesday and Friday of this past week, our class went down to the kenyon archives to finalize our displays. We met outside of class as well on Tuesday and Thursday to look into more person files that might correlate with our pre-existing research of groups on campus. Luz V. Lopes' file had one thing in her file which was a photo of her. we pulled this photo out and put it next to the ADELANTE registration document, next to her name as one of the three presidents/ founders of the group. On Friday, each group presented their displays for five minutes, discussing their process and experience curating this presentation of Kenyon history. Learning about this history, attaching a face to the names, made this history feel more attainable. I felt more connected with these people and all that they are doing, reminding of the importance of my roll on this campus, and that this reflection on a smaller history makes my role here more important.       Mond...

     One object that struck me while looking at archived materials was an anthology (in the original sense of the word) from the 1870s. This book contained more than a hundred locally-sourced pressed flowers within its pages and it held up surprisingly well. (pics related) A lot of what Yazdiha’s book The Struggle for the People’s King discusses in chapters 2 and 3 has to do with how Martin Luther King Jr’s memory has been utilized to ground and legitimize competing narratives concerning the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Nitpicking elements and words from his entire life, many arguments have been made for how King would have wanted to be remembered. His words and actions have been used to legitimize ideas of conservative white christian victimhood, to non-violent moderation and civility, radical dismantling of systemically racist systems, among others. Movements ranging from Taking Back Miami to the LGBTQ Rights movement have all strategically used the Civil R...

This week my group, the global politics group, refined our selected materials and continued to look through the archives for anything else of interest, this time looking through person files. One of the person files we were provided with on Friday was a box on Olof Palme, who attended Kenyon in the late 1940s and later went on to become prime minister of Sweden. I was surprised that I had never heard anything about him until I looked through his box, especially since he has an entire building named after him, but quickly learned of his somewhat controversial nature as a radical progressive political figure in international politics. As I gathered from the items in his box, Palme was shaped by his time in the US, essentially saying that it radicalized him into his social democratic views both due to what he witnessed when he travelled around the US after completing his bachelor’s degree and the engaged student community he was immersed in while at Kenyon. The particular event that piq...

     This week, in the archives, the most prominent thing I remember is Doris Crozier. I spent the majority of time in the archive session looking through the Crozier House Box, was presented Doris Crozier's "Person File" in class, and was searching with the intent of finding more visually aesthetic elements for our display (like a photo of Doris Crozier for example). Regardless, I would not consider myself to know a lot about Doris Crozier. I know she was the first President of the Coordinate College, I know she is Crozier House's namesake, and I know I really like her 70's chic glasses. Additionally, on Friday, all I could remember of her first name was the D . My idea of Doris Crozier does not feel like a memory, it feels like facts.      Martin Luther King Jr., on the other hand, feels more like a gut feeling. I might be able to conjure up some obscure specifics about King, but his functional presentation to me is not terribly based in true facts but sn...

After getting a lot of helpful feedback from our peers and learning from other groups' processes, our goal is to add more variation in our sources in their media type as well as their time period. Once I finished my lacrosse game and saw my messages from what I missed in class, I was excited to see we were given a new artifact to add to our collection that is unlike anything else we have. My groupmates described this piece as an old botany journal from a student in 1871 full of pages of carefully dried-out plants pressed and labeled by the hand of the author. This artifact will add a unique dimension of personality to our curation, helping us get closer to our goal of having as much variation in our media as possible.  Through Yazdiha’s work, “The Struggle For The People’s King” we spent a lot of time in class discussing the effects of using such a well-known historical figure like Dr. King for one’s movement. Coincidentally fitting in nicely with our environmental archives project...

  This week, the photo I selected is an image of a protest that our group found in the personal files of Olof Palme, the former Prime Minister of Sweden. Palme graduated from Kenyon College in 1948. This photograph stood out to me because I encountered it twice during our research. The first time, I overlooked it due to confusion and lack of context. The image did not contain any direct information about what the protest was about, where it took place (although I suspected it was at Kenyon), or who the demonstrators were targeting. As we explored another file detailing Palme’s biographical history, the context began to emerge. We learned that Palme was a radical social democrat known for his outspoken political views, and he was assassinated under ordinary, everyday circumstances. Based on this additional information, we now believe that the photo captures a protest that occurred during Palme’s graduation ceremony at Kenyon in 1948. Although we are still investigating the exact cau...