Welcome to my second-quarter Praxis project: a blog space! Here’s who I am: I am Laney, a history major, she/her pronouns, Bryn Mawr College class of 2020, Pisces. This semester I’m working on a Praxis Independent Study called “Oral Histories and Institutional Memory,” and my research focus is interviewing recent Bryn Mawr alums about the shifting conversations about race, inclusion, and history in the past 5-or-so years.
I got interested in institutional history last fall, as a member of the Telling Histories Working Group. Our “charge” was to direct the College on how to continue reinterpreting its histories of exclusion. This was the year following the decision to strip “the most Oxfordy of all the Oxfordy buildings” of its name, the name of Bryn Mawr’s second president. One of the strengths of the Group, which I credit to the open mindedness of our Chair, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, was our freedom to think divergently about historical silences and how we might fill them. As the Group began producing work, words, and reports, we began thinking about our own role in creating silences. Where, in the documentary record we were producing, was the story of how we came to be? The story that students—students with names—reframed the way we now think about Bryn Mawr’s history, and demanded the institution acknowledge that. That ended up being the focus of my oral history project this semester: the transformations in the way we talk about race and history on campus, and the student labor underlying it.
Amid the recommendations made by the THWG were curricular innovations to promote student research on institutional history. Praxis was a structure that already existed, and had supported the inception of Black at Bryn Mawr not too long ago. I learned about oral history methods from Jada Ceasar and Shannan Stafford at the Community Day of Learning last spring, whose work was foundational to this project. Much of the work this semester has been in figuring out how this work can be structurally supported in the future as well.
In my research so far, I have discovered a little secret corner of Bryn Mawr’s history: a moment of insatiable blogging that erupted around 2014, with the Greenfield grant. I tore through the Black at Bryn Mawr blog archive, all the digital exhibits (this one is my favorite), and everything I could find posted by the matriarch of the moment, Monica Mercado, Director of Greenfield, at least everything that is still hosted on the College’s website. What’s so spectacular to me about all these incredible resources, aside from the work itself, is that I had no idea it existed. But I’m also struck by how powerful it is to be in this weird communion with those who came before me, Monica and Emma and Grace, and working toward the same thing as them, even though we never got to talk about it, with each other, at the same time. This project has meant working against the inherent transience of living and working here, against perpetual loss of memory and history. And, I think a lot of people are interested.
But more practically, I intend for this blog to be a space for me to engage with my project in a reflective way. I hope to incorporate lessons from my readings and insights about content and methods. I hope to illuminate the barriers I come up against. And I hope to write candidly about my own confusion and frustrations.