This Tuesday, my English class is going to my school’s archives.
Source: Tenor
We have a research paper about something we find in the archives of Santa Clara.
Honestly, I have no idea what I am going to find because I have never been to an archive. The word archive brings a dark room with cobwebs covering the books to mind for me.
https://openreflections.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/city-archives-then1.jpg
However, I read an article written by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and she prepared me more about what I would find in an archive. She gave me tips of how I should approach going to an archive (such as selecting a topic and doing preliminary research before visiting the archive) to how I should handle objects in the archive (don’t hold the materials while reading, put them on a reading desk). The most important thing that I learned though was the purpose of visiting an archive. She quotes Kathleen A. Welsch who says:
It is the historian’s responsibility to teach us a variety of ways to read the past, to engage in historical debate, to position narratives in relation to each other so as to gain critical perspective, to draw conclusions on and consider the implications of opposing historical projects and to create constructive tension that moves us forward in our inquiry
In other words, we have to become “scholarly storytellers”.
Now that I (somewhat) know what an archive was, I need to create a research question. This part, for me, is easy.
In the news, there have been a lot of women-empowerment movements (women’s march is a great example). I want to see how the women’s movement progressed at Santa Clara. Specifically, I am going to do this by looking at the women-orientated clubs and the history of those clubs at my school.
I myself am part of a couple women’s clubs (SWE- society of women engineers, HeforShe, and my sorority). I hope to examine the history of clubs that centered around women and how they correlated to the women’s movement.
Source- Giphy
I’ll let you know what I find 🙂