Archival Pedagogy: Moving Images as Research, Resistance, and Relational Learning

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium examines moving image archives as transformative pedagogical interventions that disrupt dominant knowledge hierarchies. Through three arts-based research projects, presenters theorize how filmmaking, collage-making, and archival digitization become relational modes of ethical departure, community storytelling, and counter-narrative construction. Drawing from Tina Campt’s listening to images (2017), visual testimonio (Barrales, 2023; Bernal et al., 2017), and the ARC of Ethnic Studies (Tintiangco-Cubales, 2014), this work foregrounds archival practices rooted in felt frequencies and process-oriented pedagogy. Challenging dominant logics privileging product over process, the papers reframe archival labor as relational, embodied, and rooted in lived experience. They center histories and lived experiences of minoritized communities, offering critical frameworks for arts-based inquiry that contribute to memory-making, historical (re)interpretation, and community-based knowledge production.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Arts-Based Educational Research

Chair

• Bianca Gonzalez, McGill University

Papers

• Attuning to Presentimiento: Creating Visual Testimonios through Embodied Analysis in an Ethnic Studies Classroom - Wendy Barrales, New York University

• Counter-Archives of the Doctoral Journey: Junk Journaling as Archive-Building in Motion - Bianca Gonzalez, McGill University

• Archival Engagement as Educational Infrastructure: Digitizing Guatemalan Film Collections as an Act of Pedagogical Possibility - Alex Mejía, San Francisco State University

Session Organizer

• Bianca Gonzalez, McGill University

Discussant

• Jennifer Florencio, Claremont University - Claremont McKenna College