PROPOSAL TYPE
Roundtable
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Additional Presenters
RELATED TOPICS
- Archives
- Memory
- Public Engagement
ABSTRACT
Welcome to William & Mary’s 331st Birthday Party! Inspired by a 1993 t-shirt that celebrates the 300th Anniversary of the university’s charter by providing a selective version of the university’s history, our project reconsiders the events deemed noteworthy. Inviting William & Mary organizations to create their own t-shirts to share their telling of institutional history, our project intends to better acknowledge and celebrate marginalized people whose contributions to campus have been excluded or ignored. We will then bring these t-shirts together through an interactive exhibit in the library. As sites of memory, these t-shirts foster the opportunity to promote dialogue on institutional remembering and forgetting.
DESCRIPTION
William & Mary’s Special Collections houses a 300th birthday t-shirt replete with celebratory remarks on the university’s history. While not falsifying information, the t-shirt substantially omits more difficult parts of its past, erasing the existence of the Brafferton Indian School intended in part to “propagate the Christian gospel among the Indians” along with the history of enslaved people who built and sustained campus through the 19th century. What would a t-shirt that more fully represents William & Mary’s complicated history look like? And, who should create it?
This project challenges the 300th birthday t-shirt and the selective university history it disseminates. We will collaborate with a dozen identity and social organizations on campus to ask how they would recreate this kind of artifact on the eve of the university’s 331st birthday. Including students, staff, faculty, and alumni of differing backgrounds, perspectives, and interpretations of William & Mary’s institutional history, we will promote a yearlong conversation on the legacies of our institution. We plan to welcome and hold space for dialogue on institutional remembering and forgetting.
We prioritize relationships in moving toward a more complete version of the university’s past, collaborating with various groups to share a broad array of perspectives. We plan to organize multiple opportunities for invited groups to get to know us and each other as we work toward this community-rooted, interactive project. We want this project to serve as a mutually beneficial opportunity to amplify the narratives and voices of various groups on campus while contributing to a project bigger than each individual organization.
We will curate an exhibit in the library to incorporate these recreated t-shirts and their interpretations to illustrate artifacts as living, tangible things. We will then organize a “pop-up” exhibit where the general community can come and create their own “t-shirt” of institutional history to raise their voices toward a more complete version of the past. We are excited to foster conversations of history, memory, and reconciliation in our current moment of deep reckoning.
Our team consists of one graduate and one undergraduate student. We are seeking advice on how to fine tune and improve the project’s trajectory to facilitate dialogue and interrogation of William & Mary’s past for our present and future.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Tyler Goldberger, William & Mary, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2023. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
Hi Tyler–
I have a personal interest in this topic (W&M PhD 2001). I wonder though if you are planning on a sort of discussion of the project or are you seeking other panelists with either similar projects or insights for yours?
I like this framing of a birthday party, but it and the tee shirt seem to conflict with the goal “to better acknowledge and celebrate marginalized people whose contributions to campus have been excluded or ignored.” How can a shirt and/or birthday party do this in a meaningful way that addresses material harms in the past– with enduring legacies in the present? What possibilities emerge for shirts to effectively narrate a “complete version of the past”? Is this initiative in conversation with the Lemon Project? Or the recent “Hidden Histories of the Founding Era” OI-NEH program? I’d be interested to seeing a broader panel on commemorative avenues at universities interpreting the legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and class dynamics.
Thank you for submitting an interesting proposal to explore and discuss a wider story/history of the communities that should be recognized at William and Mary’s institutional history. I agree with the previous reviewer, I am not sure if you all have explained how a birthday party event and t-shirts will celebrate the communities that have been invited to tell their true story of their contributions and discrimination. I appreciate your attempt to bring awareness that W&M institutional history is not complete. To invite more presenters, I would widen the scope of your panel round table session. From the description/abstract, it seems like a presenter would either have to be associated with William & Mary but there are many PWIs (predominantly white institutions) that have this elitist attitude in preserving institutional history. I would edit your proposal to include diverse communities. Who are you focusing on and what is the outcome of this round table discussion? What are the outcomes you are trying to achieve? I am a bit confused on how the Library and “pop-up” exhibitions are linked to inspire the community to engage?