Teaching with the Flint Water Crisis Public Archive

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description

This workshop will introduce instructors and other interested users to an online resource being released in 2026, The Flint Water Crisis Public Archive. The archive provides primary and interpretive materials for community members, researchers and the public to understand the Flint Water Crisis. Our archive currently centers on a collection of 445,000 pages of publicly-released, crisis-related government emails and attachments, originally released as PDFs by the state of Michigan. Through the Flint Email Lab, graduate and undergraduate students have processed and cleaned a large subset of data into a searchable online database. Through local community collaborations, the archive is expanding to include community donations, oral histories and other public documents. The workshop will lay out the need for students to have access to primary source materials on this topic. The Flint Water Crisis is frequently covered in K-12 and college-level courses, but often inaccurately, and students have an increasingly vague understanding of the crisis.
We will also discuss how our project models community-engaged collaboration, working with community residents as co-creators, rather than research participants, to create tools that serve people’s needs. Feedback from this workshop will be used for making our website more responsive to users’ interests. Attendees will have an opportunity to suggest future exhibits or curriculum modules.

Learning objectives for attendees:
• Learn about this resource, and get practice using it
• Consider practical elements of working with large digital data sources, and working collaboratively with students
• Discuss the relevance of independent archival efforts for scholarship and pedagogy, as well as for community engagement and advocacy

Sub Unit

• Workshops / Teaching Workshop

Presenters

• Erik Westlund, University of Iowa

• Chad Rhym, University of Iowa

Session Organizer

• Louise Seamster, University of Iowa