Living proof: Reclaiming through my mother’s photo albums

• In Event: Archives as Resistance: Understanding Archive as Curriculum and Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

Purpose
My research agenda aims to uplift non-traditional educational spaces and honor non-academic ways of knowing that can lead to co-constructed knowledge fueled by radical thought and lived experiences conveyed through counter-narratives that precipitate self-determination and liberation. Furthermore, highlighting and analyzing my mother’s family photo collection, allowed me to revisit and reclaim my past, allowing me to realize how history is not something that stands still but something that is in constant motion (Trouillot 1995). I emphasize how my mother, like many non-white marginalized folks, is an extension of a long history of producers of knowledge and place-making practitioners who exist as everyday theorists (Schomburg 1925). My questions on institutional concepts around archives led me to co-create ongoing interactive projects. The intention behind these projects is to reach and interact with audiences that extend outside the classroom/institutions by bridging educational institutions and the broader communities I interact with.

Theoretical Framework
My work is an extension of Black liberatory pedagogies that challenge the hierarchy of knowledge creation and highlight the value of our lived experiences. I’m reminded of how vital images are to reclaiming, and reconnecting, and how they are used to tell our stories. Visionaries, like bell hooks, articulated how “the camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us created by white folks” (hooks, p8.1994, p. 8). I honor the works of Black feminist scholars who have made auto-ethnography a method of embodiment and a theory of the flesh (Lorde 1982, Cresnhaw 1989). Echoing bell hooks, who reminds us that “our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice” (pg.61, 1991).

Methods/Data Source
I use critical auto-ethnography, arts-based education research, and counter-archiving. I collaborated on a community archive and short film as ways to interact with audiences outside of school settings.

Findings
Analyzing institutional archives juxtaposed with my mother's family photo album guided me to connect and understand my life in connection to historical circumstances which influenced my ways of seeing and knowing.
These visual tools within my research assist us in being critically reflective on personal experiences as well as the cultural, political, and historical legacies that shape the spaces we interact with. My questions on institutional concepts around archives led to me co-creating an ongoing interactive project that allows past and present, to upload images, sounds, and stories to the community archive.
The community archive is interactive and meant to combat institutional archives that leave out BIPOC faces and stories.

Significance
We must engage in alternative archival practices to situate ourselves in a space towards more effective and holistic planning that continues the initiatives of those who were in the community before us. Thus, developing certain projects that trace histories to inform the present is imperative. This requires developing and amplifying counter-narratives that challenge white, Eurocentric histories that attempt to erase BIPOC faces and stories.

Author

• christopher colón, Graduate Center - CUNY