Students in Steven Maynard’s seminar, “LGBTQ Lives and Archives,” have made the their second home. Students are busy arranging and describing an unprocessed series of records in the QUA’s . The records document the history of queer activism at Queen’s and in Kingston since the early 1970s.
The idea for the course came about last year as students expressed dismay over ongoing attempts to erase queer and trans history from historical sites and monuments in the U.S. and elsewhere. Put together in conjunction with Heather Home, the public service archivist at QUA, the course adopts a ‘fight fire with fire’ approach; just as queer and trans history is being erased, students counter by naming and describing the collection’s queer historical records. In their final project in the course, students will be uploading their ‘scope and content’ descriptions of files in the series to the Archives’ database, making the records publicly visible and accessible to researchers.
In another component of the project, students researched and wrote archival administrative and biographical histories, which will accompany their scope and content descriptions on the Archives’ database. A sneak peek of these rolls out on the this week in the series “Resisting Erasure: the Queer-at-Queen’s Archives Project.” Additionally, an article in the current issue of the features students describing their experiences of archival activism.
