Presenter(s): Maia Abbruzzese, Alex Aguirre, KinsleyBallas, Devon Boom, Olivia Cain, Amelia Clapper Flynn, Avi Davis, Alex Har, Audrey Harper, Forest Kreutz, Jacob Lee, Madelyn Ragsdale, Sorrel Rosin, Ari Sepulveda, Stella Tarnoff, Marcelo Torres, Mason Williams, Maela Wirfsmith
Faculty Mentors: Judith Raiskin, Haley Wilson
ARC Posters 207-211
Research Area: Social Science
LGBTQIA+ Scholars Academic Residential Community
Funding: Undergraduate Studies, Student Life, University Housing
This year the academic focus for the LGBTQ+ Scholars ARC has been “Queer Genealogies.” We have had a number of queer “elders” come in to the ARC to address issues of LGBTQ community, history, and changing understandings of gender and sexual identity. We have also had guest presentations from a several queer faculty members about their work, specifically talking about what “queer research” is, both thematically and methodologically. In the fall and winter we also collaborated with the Intersectional Events Committee to plan the Queer Film Festival and we spent some of our meetings analyzing the representation of LGBTQ people in film over time.
This spring we will be bringing these various strands together in a Special Collections Queer Archive project. We will be working in the Special Collections with Curator Linda Long, examining a number of archival collections relevant to LGBTQ history. Linda will be meeting with the students during four class periods to introduce them to specific relevant collections,
to explain how to handle such material, and to help them in their own research in these collections. The class will divide
into four groups, each researching a particular collection. Among the ones they can choose are the SOCLAP Collection of Southern Oregon Lesbian Land, the Tee Corrine collection, the James Ivory Collection, the James Tiptree Jr. Collection, and the Rochester/Hutchinson papers. While they are having the experience of learning about established collections, they will
be initiating a new collection called the University of Oregon LGBTQ Collection as part of the Documenting University of Oregon History Project (https://library.uoregon.edu/documentinguohistory). They will be contributing their own interviews, ephemera, and papers into this collection as the base for an ongoing collection of LGBTQ life at the University of Oregon. This is an opportunity for the student to learn how collections are developed, cataloged, and made available for scholarly research.
For the Undergraduate Research Symposium, the students groups will present posters of the four collections they have researched and will present together about their work on starting the UO LGBTQ Collection. Among the topics they will address is the need for preservation of queer history, sexual/gender identity and the politics of cataloging, and the hurdles to access of queer history. They will also view the “Patient No More” traveling exhibit about the Disability Rights movement and meet with the Curator of that collection, Catherine Kudlick, from the Paul Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. After this presentation, the ARC students might be interesting in presenting on the intersections of a variety of “rights” archives from around the country.