CUNY Academic Commons

Using Archives in Social Justice Research

Using Archives in Social Justice Research is a course designed to develop students’ knowledge, skills, and strategies for using physical and digital archival material to study research questions of interest to them. Archives offer rich narrative, visual, & historical material and objects for understanding societal issues, activism, and collective efforts, lives lived in particular times and contexts, histories of groups and institutions, and justice-focused initiatives. The possible uses of archival data and material are boundless.
In this course we read theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers on archival research and discuss their relevance to students’ interests. We will visit archives and read deeply in the social sciences and humanities to sharpen students’ understanding of archives as a construct, as a rich empirical repository, and as a resource vulnerable to politicization. Topics we study include: historical and contemporary perspectives on the nature of archives; the rich variety of archives; how scholars have used archives for research of interest; methodological choices while researching archives; what published archival research looks like. By the course’s end, students will identify, design, and begin their own scholarly project utilizing archival material.