# 2020-08-11 Lae'l Hughes-Watkins / Project STAND

[Project STAND research](/y2O_Z1FYRYKS_Qu9J1BAog)

- Decentralized publications, how can we create links between the groups and publications themselves? Brought us to Project STAND and guidelines to archiving student activism
- Who puts the publications online?
- Goal: establish an archiving cooperative, platform run by student activists, tools to interlink publication, care for the metadata
- Way to reach out?
- Emma: Have friends that worked on disos. Have a friend who did one at U Chicago and Duke within past 2-3 years. All on Issuu or GDocs. Also reached out to Barnard and other institutions working on it for this fall. Especially online now since in person isn't viable.
- Lae'l: Ones we have now, have shown they're willing to share. Start with that selection and a call could go out to others, we want to make this a project highlighting everything put out over the years. Want to hear from folks who've done this work. Could be a way to deal with issues of privacy. Activists and organizers make things within community and when it gets into digital world it's a whole other level, especially if a lot of time has passed. Bringing things up from a past life. Would focus on recent/active communities + back end connections
- Casey: pretty recent selection online; archivists in institutions for a long time might have seen the older ones. Thinking about the revolving door of institutional memory, broken links. Would be really interesting to figure out are the people who are archivists at these institutions -- do they have relations to these materials? Disos that aren't online.
- Lae'l: A lot of us might not even know/aren't aware of having Disos. August/September meeting?
- What's the support you'd like to have from Project STAND? + some background about the project?
- Long term thinking: hope with Project STAND -- students become the body of the Project STAND, Living History at UCSB
- Casey: similar for us, we're people who are interested, have worked on disos, one thing that would be interesting to learn is the relationship between archivists and activists, use grounding and expertise. How to do this in a way that serves student activists rather than capturing those materials? Right now it's an informal archive...a lot to learn about what makes a collection of student activism useful and who uses it? Interesting to know who comes for requests and what do they want from it, and how do they negotiate that? What to do with an unprocessed bucket of stuff?
- Lae'l: Forums? Chicago State university -- we come to the archives for a blueprint? What does the institution owe us? We're still fighting for stuff from decades ago? What did you do that was successful and how do you build on that? The archives is the blueprint, the groundwork done before that student activists can look at today. Students bring back stuff that used to happen. Continue tradition and build on what those in the past did?
- Casey: related to campaign memory, trying to figure out how to explain to groups what we're doing and why?
- Emma: Diso is not as integrated into their own organizing work but they were trying to figure out a way to keep intergenerational memory alive. It wasn't based around going to a specific archive and looking there, campaign memory is kept alive within people and not archival work. Depends on school and group, but Diso is specifically for incoming students and people new to the history and organizing, changes the formatting and content. Not as much for people who are already doing the work there. It's a granular difference. who are the students coming in and what kind of body of knowledge do they bring in or take from archive.
- Casey: kind of a related project -- what kinds of tools and memory do groups need to pass on? We didn't really know where to look to know how we should be organizing our stuff so that it's remembered from our perspective. Organizing crossing over post grad. Been a while!
- Lae'l: we have an advisory board (trying to reformulate) and are finding partnerships with students/recent grads. Inviting us informally to be on the advisory team. Not a severe time commitment, keeping it light and not so stressful!
- (emma) I have a question about who they are collaborating with -- can give us pointers + leads, I've mostly been asking individual students and not groups but that might be helpful
- curious about oral history, about what archivist training for students looks like, how they consider technology in their practice

I will drop some questions here too later today and down to send by EOD @emma so that Lae'l can send to their advisory board! That was sooo coool :)

I'll also share some thoughts + questions I have as well! thanks for setting the meeting up, lae'l is great :)

## Email to Lae'l

### About us

Hi Lae'l,

Thank you for taking the time to meet with us today (especially while on the road with a laptop in need of a charge!). As we mentioned in our call, we have brief bio and many questions for you/the Project STAND advisory board below.

A bit about us:

Disorientations is an informal archive of 100+ disorientation publications by student activists, threading counter-narratives across institutions. These zines are vital examples of grassroots literature which subvert the glossy narratives put forth by universities. Though abundant, they are very disconnected — and like other activist ephemera, many don’t make it online, are lost to time, or face deliberate erasure.

We're a group of volunteers with interests in activism, archiving, and publishing working to shape, maintain, and update this collection.

### Questions

We ended up coming up with a bunch of questions -- no pressure to answer all of them in full or super extensively! These can also be things we discuss when we meet.

- We've read your guide/toolkit but would love to know more about who's a part of Project STAND, what brought you there, and what you're excited about?
- Do any of the archivists at Project STAND know about disorientations not listed on the site, or student activist zine cultures/publications they can point us to?
- How do you think about the relationship between activists and archivists as we try to answer that for ourselves?
- How do you think of your archive as something that serves and support student activists rather than just capturing their work? How do you make it useful for activists?
- Who uses student activism archives? What kinds of requests do you get and from who? What kind of work do you do? What do students come to you for? How do you negotiate use and access?
- Do you have experience with oral histories or resources on how to go about doing it?
- What does archivist training for student activists/student archive workers look like?
- How do you consider technology in your archiving practice?

We are excited about this group and are really open to collaboration and would love to help each other out and connect! If there's anything we can do for you/you need from us/if there are any questions you have, feel free to let us know.