THIRD SYMPOSIUM ANNOUNCED

September 19-20, 2019

Generational Activism: Documenting Boycotts to Hashtags

Keynote Speaker

September 20, 2019

A historian at heart, reporter by (w)right, rebel by reason, Walidah Imarisha is an educator, writer, public scholar and spoken word artist. She edited two anthologies, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. Imarisha’s nonfiction book Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She is also the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars, and in 2015, she received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing.
Click to
Days
Hours
Minutes
Seconds

Call for Papers

Panelists

Dr. Dara Walker

Dara Walker is the 2018-2019 postdoctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. She holds a PhD in History from Rutgers University. Her research interests include African American history, urban history, 20th century U.S. history, public history, and the digital humanities. She is currently writing her book manuscript which examines the role of the high school organizing tradition in the development of black radical politics of the Black Power era.

Dr. Catherine Knight Steele

Dr. Steele is a Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Maryland and a scholar of race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. Her research has appeared in the Howard Journal of Communications and the book Intersectional Internet (S.U. Noble and B. Tynes Eds.) Her doctoral dissertation, Digital Barbershops, focused heavily on the black blogosphere and the politics of online counterpublics.

Dr. Jessica Lu

Dr. Lu serves as a Postdoctoral Associate to the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative and a Research Educator in the First-Year Innovation & Research Experience (FIRE) program. Trained as a rhetorical historian, she studies the history of ideas through analysis of public discourse, with a focus on black resistance and (re)invention. In both her research and teaching, she seeks to enrich humanist inquiry with digital tools and methods, while also interrogating how digital practices can sustain erasure, exclusion, and racial violence.

Dr. Martha Biondi

Dr. Biondi (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1997) is a member of the Department of African American Studies with a courtesy joint appointment in the History Department. She specializes in twentieth century African American History and is the author of To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City published by Harvard University Press, which awarded it the Thomas J. Wilson Prize as best first book of the year. The University of California Press published her book, The Black Revolution on Campus, an account of the nationwide Black student movement of the late 1960s and early Black Studies movement of the 1970s. She is currently researching a book on neoliberalism, violence and Black life, focusing on Chicago since the 1980s.

Dr. Stefan Bradley

Dr. Bradley is the Professor and Chair of African American Studies, Los Angeles, CA. He is interested in the role that youth have played in shaping post-WWII American society. More specifically, he is fascinated with the efforts and abilities of black college students to change not only their scholastic environments but also the communities that surrounded their institutions of higher learning. Amazingly, young people, by way of protests and demands, have been able to influence college curricula as well as the policies of their schools.”

Dr. Ricky Punzalan

He is an assistant professor of archives and digital curation at the College of Information Studies (iSchool), affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, and co-director of Museum Scholarship and Material Culture program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He examines how archival records and archival repositories contribute to the creation and preservation of collective memory as well as in achieving social justice. His interest in archives, community, and collective memory led me to explore the emergence of collective memory as a concept in archival studies. Punzalan is particularly interested in colonial archives as they are re-interpreted in postcolonial communities.

Dr. Mariam Durrani

Dr. Mariam Durrani’s research focuses on Muslim youth and communities, cultural mobilities, higher education in Pakistan and the United States, race, gender, and migration studies.

Second Symposium Highlights

CENTERING THE MARGINAL: TOWARD INCLUSIVITY IN THE DOCUMENTATION OF STUDENT STRUGGLE

FINAL-STAND-RUI-symposium-06032019-2
CLICK THE IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO

Featured Collection:

Native American Community Center, 1973-2018, Stanford University Archives

On October 21, 1970, Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) was formed. They immediately advocated for Stanford’s administration to address Native American students’ experiences of isolation and cultural shock by creating a community center, residence hall, Native American Studies, retention services, and increase recruitment of Native students, faculty, and staff. The following year, the first iteration of the Native American Cultural Center (NACC) opened, a community center for Native students. An issue of contention for students was Stanford’s promotion of the Indian mascot, “Prince Lightfoot,” a tradition going back to the 1930s. On November 22, 1970, SAIO petitioned for the removal of the mascot as it was a caricature of Native Americans and mocked religious practices. They were successful when in 1972, the mascot was officially banned by Stanford President Richard Lyman, the Board of Trustees, and ASSU (Associated Students of Stanford University). In 1971, SAIO hosted Stanford’s first Powwow as a means to combat the negative image and to bring diverse programming and greater Native American presence to campus. This is a tradition that continues today.

The NACC collection is 12.25 linear feet and includes audiovisual material, language instruction, newsletters (1974-2010), posters, and photographs (1970-2018). Stanford’s holdings of early SAIO material, including the 1971 petition, can be found in President Dick Lyman’s papers. According to Stanford University Archivist, Daniel Hartwig, they are committed to building the collection to more fully reflect Native student experiences at Stanford. There are challenges regarding trust due to the university’s history of the Indian mascot. Still, the Archives’ growing relationship with NACC has led to more transfer of material, some of which has been and is being digitized and promoted online. University Archives also looks forward to working with NACC as they plan an oral history project for the 50th anniversary of the Powwow.

Poster of Stanford Powwow, 1971. SC1228. Courtesy of Stanford University Archives.
Petition presented to the ombudsman of Stanford University, January 1972. SC0215. Courtesy of Stanford University Archives.
Stanford Native Students Jim Ruel and Wilson Pipestem, and NACC Director Benny Shendo, carrying flags during Grand Entry, Stanford Powwow. SC1228. Courtesy of Stanford University Archives.

Rally for the “Stanford Indian,” with Timm Williams as main speaker, SC1125. Courtesy of Stanford University Archives.

Collection
Stanford University, News and Publication Service, audiovisual recordings, 1936-2011 (inclusive)

IMLS Grant 2018

   
Project STAND receives a $92,096 National Leadership Grant for Libraries Program award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services On August 24, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded Project STAND (STudent Activism Now Documented) $92,096 under the National Leadership Grant for Libraries Program.  Established in fall 2016, Project STAND is a nationwide consortium of more than 40 colleges and universities that is creating an online hub to heighten access to digital and analog archival and historical collections documenting student activism.   —-more—-

Collections

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

James Baldwin

Student activism has and continues to serve as a critical component to the development of a truly democratic society. The collections featured here are from various colleges and universities and they highlight the struggles, victories, and challenges of student movements throughout history.

Connect with these participating institutions to learn more.

About

History

In the fall of 2016, Project STAND (Student Activism Now Documented) was established to initially bring together academic institutions across the state of Ohio and discuss ways to share information about the collections and materials related to student activism on their campuses, with a primary focus on marginalized student identities (African American, LGBTQ, Chicano/a, differently abled, Asian Americans, indigenous populations etc.) This exciting initiative was initially conceived by Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, University Archivist at Kent State University who reached out to Tamar Chute, University Archivist at The Ohio State University, on the possibility of creating a centralized hub for academic archives focusing on underrepresented communities’ engagement in social justice activities on and off campus.

Project STAND is an online clearinghouse where academic institutions can provide researchers a centralized access point to historical and archival documentation on the development and on-going occurrences of student dissent. Project STAND focuses on digital and analog primary sources that document the activities of student groups that represent the concerns of historically marginalized communities (e.g., African American, Chicano/a, LGBTQ, religious minorities, disabled, etc.). STAND will also highlight the work of others (e.g., faculty, staff, and administrators) who advocate for or support the interests of those communities.

More information about participating institutions can be found here.

Join Us

Interested in joining Project Stand? Please submit some information about your institution’s collection.