Roundtable: Pedagogy and the Archives – CFP for SSAWW 2021

In their new article “What We Want Students to Remember: Archival Recovery as a Sustainable Critical Praxis” (2020), Heather Fox and Amanda Stuckey model how teaching with archives can “study its intended function and potential purposes over time can be a form of recovery that takes a holistic view of the process” (21). As 2020 disrupted teaching and largely halted archival recovery projects, it also drove women out of the workforce at alarming rates. If we look to any possibilities of recovery in 2021, we want to think about processes for women’s work, women’s writing, and reimagining how we recover American women writers with undergraduates. This roundtable invites 5-10 minute presentations that share innovative approaches to integrating archives into the undergraduate classroom and that pose corresponding questions or present challenges for discussion. Possibilities include classroom incorporation of specific archival materials, assignments involving archival research, rhetorical analysis of archives, and opportunities for students to create archives.

Roundtable contributors are particularly encouraged to consider: interrelations among archives, power relations, public memory, and pedagogy; what constitutes an archive; silence, violence, absence, and archival sustainability, archives and recovering women writers, women’s bodies in archives, undergraduate project models and collaboration with special collections librarians and archivists, collaboration with private collections or public cultural institutions outside of the university, creating community partners, teaching computational methods to surface patterns at scale in digital archival collections, teaching archives in the pandemic.

Please contact Kirsten Paine (klp78@pitt.edu) or Denise Kohn (dkohn@bw.edu) to submit a proposal by January 27th, 2021.