Stephanie Childress (she/her) is a third year PhD student in American Studies. She is currently teaching a course titled “Archives and Activism: Digital Recovery | Texas Memory;” we asked her how her course is going so far & how her course embodies American Studies at UT. This is her response.

This course explores methods for digital recovery of historical memory through the regional lens of Texas. As a project-based collaborative research course, we engage alternative archives for telling under-told histories and discussing current and historical social movements - people, protests, uprisings, riots, and activism. Alternate archives include community/family memory, “rogue archives,” data archives, “reading against the (institutional) grain,” and more. Student’s final digital projects are built in collaborative teams. Some teams have already identified their projects - one is creating an interactive online experience that allows the user to learn about queer histories in Austin. Another is working on labor organizing efforts in Texas. The other two groups will be developing topics in environmental and criminal justice.

I am teaching research through the “design process,” which is a procedural model from Engineering. My hope is that my students leave the course with not only a conceptual and methodological approach to digital recovery work but that they know how to take action on issues of social or global importance. While we know that research and social change do not happen in neatly defined steps, this process gives them the building blocks to guide them as they learn. When they leave the course, they can replicate these steps to act in moments and with movements that call to them.

One of my favorite moments of the course was during a guided primary source analysis on the labor organizing efforts of Cesar Chavez at the Benson. One student commented about the carefully organized efforts of the labor organizers. The repetition of “organized” here is intentional and contrasts a discussion we started in our first week about witnessing many social movements fizzle after attending one protest or sharing an Instagram slide. Our discussions, activities, guest speakers, and the project design process aims to teach students that there is no absolute finality to activism or recovery work. It is a cycle that is constantly asking us - what’s next?

The class is “classic American Studies” in that I am asking students to investigate current social issues, retrace the “border crossings” of the United States imperial project, learn approaches to avoid recolonization, and look to a future of restoration and healing. The course also draws from other disciplines like public & digital humanities. What I am learning is that the class is not interdisciplinary because I have mixed methods as an instructor and scholar, it is interdisciplinary because of what my students bring to class from their disciplinary training. I have students from Computer Science, Natural Science, Data Science, Communications, Business, Government, History, Psychology, Economics, and American Studies who each bring a unique perspective and a way they approach the course. Developing and teaching this course has been a great experience!