Dear community writers and community archivers, past, present, and future:
I’m writing to solicit interest in a session for CCW (10/23-10/25@Detroit, MI) that would involve pairs or teams of collaborators (but no solo presenters) discussing issues related to archiving community writing writ large.
Some initial guideposts for an otherwise exceedingly open-ended roundtable or workshop opportunity include the following:
- We’ll approach key terms—community, writing, archive/archiving—as open to interpretation in relation to how each pair’s or team’s work is located in time and place, how projects are sourced and resourced, and how they are situated rhetorically;
- We’ll appreciate and wrangle with aspects of community-engaged work that are "archive-resistant" (e.g., experiential, active/enacted, affective, "live" rather than recorded);
- Although we may share accomplishments or deliverables (e.g., extant archives, established or proposed collection protocols, event plans), we’ll center our contributions on one or more of the questions driving our current and ongoing efforts;
- Our pairs and teams will feature members who bring different interests and perspectives to our projects, including but not limited to our positionalities as community members/partners, students, faculty, academic staff, &c.
An example: The team I’m part of includes myself (rhet-comp faculty in English), a campus colleague with a staff appointment in community engagement, the ED of a local nonprofit, and (hopefully) a student from a course I’m teaching this spring. Our questions stem from our desire to "tell" (e.g., gather, document, story) the living history of the nonprofit in ways that represent—in infrastructure, protocols, content—the plurality of perspectives involved. Rather than searching for models of community archiving we might copycat (with or without significant retrofits), we’re puzzling over how, in concert with our particular flux of partners and interlocutors, we might do meaningful archiving and/or develop archive-ish activities that creatively negotiate our interests, assets, limits, and needs.
If you’re anywhere between intrigued and interested, be in touch by 2/1, and we’ll go from there—
Jenn
May her memory be a revolution
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