CLCS 181 - Facing the Vassar College Archive: An EPI Intensive

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Our library contains texts and photographs that reflect harmful depictions of racial stereotypes, and the racism embedded in our predominantly white institution’s culture. Jointly taught by college librarians and a faculty member, this class confronts our college’s past and present through developing community-centered strategies for reckoning with our institutional history using the college archive as a site for reflection and interrogation. One goal of this class is to create an end of semester Vassar-community-facing project (an exhibition, timeline, or something similar) that invites the community to engage with honest accounts of Vassar’s history and take part in envisioning and enacting a more antiracist present and future.  Collectively, we work to imagine ways in which community values can inform library and archival practices for access to materials that continue to have harmful effects. Debra Bucher, Jonathon Kahn, and Melanie Maksin.

One 90-minute period.

Course Format: INT