What is the Personal Archive Assignment?
The PAA is a scaffolded, multi-part assignment that empowers students to assert their presence in the archives. Students combat systemic annihilation and foster personal well-being by assembling a collection of items and metadata that makes up their Personal Archive.
The PAA directs students to select items which communicate and document their experience/s during 2020 and beyond. The prompts, combined with salient student experiences, highlight living through the COVID-19 pandemic, the most recent #BLM uprising and protests, and other events.
Along with helping students record and critically engage with their lived reality, this assignment has several purposes:
To introduce the concept of symbolic annihilation and then imagine how creating a personal archive can counter systemic forces that silence, erase, deny, and minimize
To build radical empathy, both in and out of the classroom
To help students explore what an archive is, understand how archives are political, and that archives are often the product of heteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacist institutions
To help students develop an understanding of intersectional analysis, utilizing it as a lens to interrogate mass movement, other, and self