Creating Counter Archives: The University of Washington Bothell's Feminist Community Archive of Washington Project

Abstract

Using feminist pedagogical practices that incorporate student knowledge production and digital scholarship methods, a team at the University of Washington Bothell founded the online, open-access Feminist Community Archive of Washington (FCA-WA). Faculty, students, and the library partner with local feminist and gender justice organizations to develop content for the archive. As part of a core gender, women, & sexuality studies (GWSS) course, our/the assignment asks the students to collect artifacts and conduct interviews with activists that document the current work and histories of their organizations. The library has archived these materials and made them available in an open-access, online digital collection. In an era of disappearing information and contested stories, the FCA-WA aims to expand the archival record and serve as a permanent and open home for the histories of groups and individuals working to support social justice for women, femmes, gender-nonconforming folks, and their allies. We contend that the assignment and archive, in addition to being a repository for potentially forgotten histories, are projects that embody intersectional feminist praxis and work toward upsetting academic structures of inequity. In the academy, marginalized peoples’ stories and research methods are rendered invisible; classes and assignments that “speak to” or are taught by minoritized students and faculty are not the norm. Similarly, archives are typically created and maintained by non-marginalized scholars, ultimately reflecting the stories of the elite, their ways of knowing, and their methods of research. Perhaps most troubling, said archives are framed as neutral receptacles, which perpetuates a false narrative that leaves power imbalances unquestioned. We maintain that the FCA-WA, and the assignment used to fill it, undermines these hierarchical logics and structures. In this paper, we seek to explain the assignment and archive in the context of intersectional feminism. We then explain the assignment and archive, and conclude by demonstrating the potential of feminist, community-engaged, student knowledge production and archive building to subvert academic hierarchies, and we consider directions for future research and collaborations.