Ongoing Kenyon: What is yet-to-be-remembered

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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 was especially relevant to this was the role that memory work plays in solidarity and elevating localized concerns into collective public ones, especially in highlighting similarities and differences between groups. As Yazdiha pointed out, the role Black Women played in the MeToo movement was to elevate what could have been seen as only sexual violence into a political issue that had both components of racial and sexual discrimination (Yazdiha 2023: 165-167). In other words, collective memory offers the potential for collective social action, especially if they find a common cause.


Applying this insight by Yazdiha to our project, what we just did can be seen as a kind of "simulation" in miniature of this process. By creating a chronological continuity among similarly marginalized groups from different backgrounds, we highlighted both the conditions and social norms that had to be changed for them to gain entry, but also the ways in which these norms changed at different times and under different circumstances. In other words, solidarity across differences and along the lines of similarity has the potential to create new collectively held subjective senses of self  also created a kind of similarity by creating a timeline which explains why  Kenyon's population is in the present. What it will become next is decidedly less clear.



References

Yazdiha, Hajar. (2023). The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Cvil Rights Movement. Princeton University Press.

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