Nov 13, 2024  
2024-2025 Pitzer Catalog 
    
2024-2025 Pitzer Catalog
Add to Portfolio (opens a new window)

ENGL 161A PZ -Archiving Social Movements


Institution: Pitzer

Description: Archiving Social Movements: Forms of Institutional and Cultural Memory The act of preserving the voices of oppressed groups, marginalized communities, and social movements can itself be a form of activism. The Social Movements Collection, held in Special Collections at the Claremont Colleges Library, made up of various materials from differing social movements throughout the 20th century is an excellent local example. Holdings include materials from the Black civil rights movement, Chicanx Movement, the United Farm Workers, the Young Lords movement, and the Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles. Items in the collection range from pamphlets, zines, photographs, banners, posters, programs, art, and tattoo designs. As a class, and in collaboration with the staff at Special Collections, we will explore what these holdings tell us about the past—and our present. Contextualizing the histories of struggle surrounding the Collection’s artifacts, we will also ask what sorts of forgotten or occluded futures they invoke. At the same time, the course will examine literature and other creative forms as an alternative means of transmitting cultural memory, teasing out how institutional narratives, ellisions, censorship, and budgetary limitations are addressed and redressed beyond “the archive.†The course will conclude with an examination of grassroots archival practices, including Veteranas And Rucas and the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising digital repository. For the final project, students will create a digital activist archive of their own.

Prerequisite(s): See the current course schedule for registration restrictions.

For up-to-date information on current course offerings and details, please refer to the Pitzer class schedule on MyCampus2 Portal .



Add to Portfolio (opens a new window)