Category Archives: Reflections on the Writing Process

A Day at the Migrant Shelter: Reflections on Scholar-Activism

“A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

Founder, Enrique Morones, addresses volunteers outside Border Angels San Diego office. Photo by Gabriel Briano.

Having administered finals to my students and submitted a dissertation chapter to my advisor, I hopped in my car and drove off towards Mexico. I didn’t press pause on my diligent grading of Bluebooks just to go blow off steam after a long fall quarter, rather I went to deliver donations to Central American asylum-seekers living in migrant shelters in Tijuana.

This so-called Caravan of Love was organized by the Border Angels, a San Diego-based migrant aid non-profit. Since this trip to the migrant shelter, my brain has raced with a mirage of sights, sounds, questions, and lessons of that day. This post is a result of my churning, restless mind. I want to share some experiences of this day as a way to reflect on my efforts as a scholar-activist (a scholar who uses the privileges of academia to serve marginalized communities). Here, I evaluate my own positionality and privileges in order to grow as I continue my uneven and ongoing endeavor to be a scholar-activist. In a very meta way, I also imagine this post itself as part of the process of scholar-activism in that I write in hopes of empowering undergraduates, fellow grad students, and established scholars to feel emboldened to partake in the challenge of scholar-activism. I’m directly asking Humanities Core students to ponder the potential real-life implications of their training in the humanities.

Furthermore, I hope to shed light on the growing humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border by bringing together its historical context with what I witnessed first-hand (albeit from a brief and extraordinarily limited perspective).

My scholar-activism often feels as messy and complicated as my own identity. I am a mixed-race Filipino American woman (Filipino father and white mother) born and raised in Virginia. I attribute the realities of my family’s immigration story and growing up in the south as having led me to the humanities in general and the study of migration history in particular. Indeed, as an undergraduate I turned to the humanities in search of answers to my brewing questions about race, empire, and migration. Now I am a PhD candidate in history at UC Irvine, where I am writing a dissertation on Central American refugee policies in the 1980s (the historical moment in which today’s migration crisis has its roots). As a Filipina American and historian of migration, I have both personal and professional investments in immigration justice.

In response to the increasingly volatile media coverage of the Caravan of Central Americans fleeing violence and hunger, I decided to act. So, in December, my partner Gabriel, a Mexican American photographer (whose photos I have included in this essay), joined me in volunteering with the Border Angels. I had worked with this group on multiple occasions over the last few years, participating in their desert water drops and  day labor outreach. This time we were taking supplies that they had been collecting for over a month and delivering them to Tijuana.

As a historian, I know the history of the U.S. policies towards Central America is long and sordid. I also understand that U.S. violence towards Central American refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants is not a new phenomenon. Yet, I’m still astounded by the violent policies toward Central American migration under the Trump administration. The Caravan, child separation, the tear gassing of families at the border, the death of children in U.S. border patrol custody have all become more visible to non-Central American communities. I hoped that maybe by volunteering at the shelter these disturbing events would make more sense.

It didn’t. The trip to Tijuana made nothing make sense. If anything it raised more questions as I, a privileged outsider, looked on at the scenes of the migrant shelter known as El Barretal. In it I saw just a snapshot of something I do not truly understand. El Barretal was a place of potentially dehumanizing conditions that, to my eye, was still bubbling over with humanity (including the little boy who was literally and joyfully blowing bubbles).

On Saturday, December 15th, 2018, we met a group of volunteers at the Border Angels office. We organized donations, we waited, we listened, we waited some more. Then we loaded the boxes and bags of the donations into our cars. Together we were 12 cars caravanning south to three different Tijuana shelter locations in three separate groups. In our group, unsure of both address and directions, the volunteer drivers of four cars scrambled to follow the vehicle of Border Angels veteran, Hugo Castro. I may or may not have boldly ran two red lights to keep up as Hugo led our group to El Barretal, a vacant nightclub-turned migrant shelter.

Upon arriving we parked on the cramped Tijuana street brimming with city life. On top of the already busy Tijuana car and foot traffic was the newly added Mexican military, federal police, and other government officials guarding the area, international volunteers unloading donations, and Central American migrants coming in and out of the shelter grounds.

After the hectic process of unloading the supplies into the storeroom, where they would be processed and distributed, those running the shelter suggested that the Border Angels volunteers visit the main living quarters. We were instructed to sign-in and exchange our identification for visitors’ passes. We then entered through a maze of steel barricades that opened into the half-indoor half-outdoor living space. Immediately, we were greeted by the sights and sounds of men singing, kids playing, and people selling snacks and cigarettes. An official explained to us that the front part (mostly open air) of the once vacant grounds now served as the living area for single men, while the enclosed back side served to house women and families.

Entrance to El Barretal. Photo by Gabriel Briano.

Sign on tent that reads “I am my own employer. American Dream.” Photo by Gabriel Briano.

Asylum-seeker sits atop the roof of the shelter. Photo by Gabriel Briano.

We saw the outdoor showers and portable toilets for the women and children before we entered the main living area for the families. Hundreds of tents populated the large indoor space. It almost looked like a warehouse except for the stage, bar, and dance floor that peeked out from behind the mass of tents, betraying the former nightclub.

Inside the area for women and families. Photo by Gabriel Briano.

With no specific instruction on how to spend our time, the ten members of our group started breaking off on their own. Some of the volunteers interviewed women and children who were sitting among the tents. Gabriel joined two other experienced photographers in trying to capture daily life. Hugo gave an interview to a journalist about the Border Angels’ work. I chose to play with some kids because I found their cheerful energy contagious. We threw a ball, we pushed around a toy firetruck, and we stacked some blocks. Many children were laughing and playing. In a display of resourcefulness, the older kids were even using strollers to zoom their younger siblings around the concrete floor.

Children play at El Barretal. Photo by Gabriel Briano.

Our group stayed for only an hour or so after accomplishing the main task of delivering the donations before heading back to the United States. On the long drive home, which included a 3.5 hour wait at the U.S. border, I had plenty of time to discuss the day’s events with Gabriel and another volunteer. We each expressed our discomfort at what felt — regardless of our intentions — voyeuristic at times. As we neared the parking lot in Irvine, Gabriel lamented that his approach to the photos had to be from the outside looking in. “There were some things I could capture. But others I just couldn’t. Like the insides of the tents.”

Indeed, since this trip, I have done much reflection on what I cannot see or understand as a volunteer, as a historian, or as a scholar-activist. From my limited perspective, I’ll never know what really happened on their journey to Tijuana. I’ll never understand the hopes or anxieties about what might come next. I can’t see what it’s like at night, the dreams, the nightmares. The prayers, tears, jokes inside the tents aren’t for me to hear.

Asylum-seekers sit among the tents. Photo by Gabriel Briano.

View as volunteers left the shelter. Photo by Gabriel Briano.

But what can I contribute as a scholar-activist?

I can tell you what I did see. I saw first-hand that donations are still greatly needed. They are not being wasted. They are used and are precious. If you have the resources, please donate.

I can ask you to volunteer your time with the Border Angels and other organizations, who need volunteers that are privileged enough to move across the U.S.-Mexico border with relative ease — in that they have a U.S. passport, a vehicle, and the time to sit in the return lane for 3-4 hours. I have found that much of this work is waiting, but this is because much of this work is about being there, being a witness. This is even more important now, as conditions at El Barretal and other shelters rapidly deteriorate.

I can remind you that U.S. intervention in Central America and U.S. immigration policy are the most significant historical factors in the creation of the migrant crisis. Read about it. There are lots of books and articles written on this subject, including many by Central American scholars (see Abrego and Menjívar).

Finally, I can share that I witnessed humanity and hope manifesting within what continuously threatens to be dehumanizing conditions. Do not look away from these families.

For me, scholar-activism is a tangled web of personal and professional investments that simultaneously enrich and clash with each other. The efforts both empower me and leave me self-critical. In many ways my experiences at the end of last quarter exemplify my attempt to juggle my commitments to research, teaching, and activism.

I struggled with how to approach this post. I wanted it to be useful to somebody beside myself. I hoped to promote scholar-activism within higher education, while pushing myself and others to think critically of how they use their privilege. I desired to share what I saw in El Barretal. I tried to do all of this, just like I tried to understand the humanitarian crisis at the border. I likely didn’t succeed in all these things. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe what’s most important is that I keep trying to do better.

Works Cited

Abrego, Leisy J. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

BBC News. Trump and the Facts about the Migrant Caravan – BBC News. Accessed January 14, 2019.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETUqj2Fi9ZA.

“‘Caravan of Love’ Delivers Necessities, Moral Support to Migrants Camped in Tijuana – The San Diego Union-Tribune.” Accessed January 14, 2019.https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/border-baja-california/sd-me-caravan-of-love-20181208-story.html.

Cervantes, Cecilia Menjívar and Andrea Gómez. “El Salvador: Civil War, Natural Disasters, and Gang Violence Drive Migration.” migrationpolicy.org, August 27, 2018.https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/el-salvador-civil-war-natural-disasters-and-gang-violence-drive-migration.

“Border Angels-Home.” Accessed January 14, 2019.https://www.borderangels.org/.

“Life Becomes More Uncertain for Migrant Families Camped in Tijuana | 89.3 KPCC.” Accessed January 14, 2019.https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/12/24/87652/life-becomes-more-uncertain-for-migrant-families-c/.

Menjívar, Cecilia. Immigrant Families. Immigration & Society Series. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.

“Mexico: Tijuana Declares Humanitarian Crisis over Migrant Caravan | World News | The Guardian.” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/24/mexico-tijuana-declares-humanitarian-crisis-over-migrant-caravan.

“Migrants in Tijuana Know Trump Doesn’t Want Them. They Aren’t Giving Up. – The New York Times.” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/world/americas/tijuana-mexico-migrant-caravan.html.

“Missing Border Angels Activist Found Alive in Mexico – The San Diego Union-Tribune.” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/courts/sd-me-castro-found-20170418-story.html.

“San Diego Advocates Seek Clothing, Blankets For Caravan Migrants | KPBS.” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/nov/27/san-diego-advocates-seek-clothing-blankets-caravan/.

“The Importance of Being a Scholar-Activist (Opinion).” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2018/03/30/importance-being-scholar-activist-opinion.

Tseng-Putterman, Mark. “A Century of U.S. Intervention Created the Immigration Crisis.” Medium, June 21, 2018. https://medium.com/s/story/timeline-us-intervention-central-america-a9bea9ebc148.

“UNHCR – Central American Refugees and Migrants Reach Mexico City.” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2018/11/5be2ed814/central-american-refugees-migrants-reach-mexico-city.html.

“What Is Life like in El Barretal, the New Shelter for Caravan Migrants in Tijuana? – The Washington Post.” Accessed January 14, 2019 .https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/a-makeshift-shower-in-a-muddy-courtyard-donated-meals-too-far-apart/2018/12/03/43c6e078-f67f-11e8-863a-8972120646e0_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a39bff2d5788.

“What Is the Caravan That Has Arrived in Tijuana and Why Is It Angering President Trump? – The Washington Post.” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/the-trump-administration-vs-the-caravan-heres-what-you-need-to-know/2018/04/26/921636be-489e-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html?utm_term=.ca33cbbb0f71.

“Where to Donate to Help Migrant Children and Families at the Border.” Accessed January 14, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/where-to-donate-to-help-immigrant-children-and-families-at-the-border.html.

Rachael De La Cruz is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in Central American history, migration studies, and gender. Her dissertation, entitled “Surveillance, Settlements, and Sanctuary: Comparative Refugee Policies in Central America during Salvadoran Civil War,” examines the treatment of Salvadoran refugees in other Central American countries during the 1980s. Her article “No Asylum for the Innocent: Gendered Representations of Salvadoran refugees in the 1980” was published in the Gender and Migration special edition of the American Behavioral Scientist.

Is the Aeneid We Are Reading the Same One That Virgil Wrote?

Aeneas and Achates entering Carthage, as pictured in the Vergilianus Vaticanus folio 13r, found at the Apostolic Library, Vatican

Aeneas and Achates entering Carthage, as pictured in the Vergilianus Vaticanus folio 13r. Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

This post was originally published on September 29, 2016.

For educated people in the European Middle Ages, the Aeneid was probably the most important piece of literature next to the Bible: it was the greatest epic poem written in Latin which was the standard language of learning across Europe. It is no accident that Dante chose Virgil to lead him through the Nine Circles of Hell in Inferno. As a scholar of Late Roman and Medieval European literature, then, the Aeneid is an important book for me to be pretty familiar with.

One of the most important questions I have to ask myself at the start of any research project – but particularly about such an old text – is whether or not I can trust the edition I am working with. This is obviously a problem when we are reading in translation, but even if we were all reading the Aeneid in Latin in Humanities Core, we would still have to ask… is this really what Virgil wrote? Here’s why.

The version of Virgil’s Aeneid that we are reading is an excellent translation by Robert Fagles. But let me ask you a question: where did he find his text to translate from? The Aeneid was written between 29 and 19 BCE, but printed type was not introduced into Europe until around 1440 CE. How did the poem exist between when Virgil composed it and when Fagles translated it into English for us?

You may be surprised to know that there is no single “original” version of the Aeneid from 19 BCE that all of our printed copies comes from. Virgil, like most Romans, probably wrote his works on papyrus sheets or scrolls. Now in a dry environment like Egypt, papyrus can last a very long time, but in a more humid climate like Italy, a papyrus scroll would begin to fall apart within a century. This meant that scribes had to make new hand-written copies (manu scripta in Latin) of important texts like Virgil’s works in order to preserve them. Almost all of these scrolls turned to dust long ago.

Near the end of the Roman Empire, however, it became more common for scribes to write on a new material made of dried and stretched animal skin called parchment, and to bind these pieces of parchment together into a codex: what we would call a book. The Getty Museum has produced a short but excellent video about how manuscripts were made.

Parchment is far more durable than papyrus, and it is no coincidence that the seven earliest versions of the Aeneid that still exist today are parchment copies from around the year 400 CE, more than four centuries after Virgil’s death (Courtney 13). Thanks to a number of digitization projects at archives and libraries around the world, you can actually look at digitized versions of some of these manuscripts online, like the Vergilius Vaticanus and Vergilius Romanus, both preserved at the Apostolic Library of the Vatican. All of these surviving manuscripts are incomplete, damaged, or compromised in some way. There were in all likelihood many other parchment and papyrus copies from this early date that were completely lost or destroyed during the violent dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Even if we had a totally complete, undamaged copy of the Aeneid from 400 CE, however, it still might be affected by scribal errors. Since each copy was made by hand, it is easy to see how scribal mistakes, mis-readings, and other variations could grow and become compounded in later copies. It is unknown how many copies of copies were made between Virgil’s own text of the Aeneid and these seven “witnesses,” but the text of all seven differ from each other. Some of these variations are clearly mistakes or corruptions of the original text; other differences between the manuscripts are harder to adjudicate, and it takes scholarship known as “textual criticism” to be able to tell which text is closer to the original. Sometimes, mistakes in the manuscripts will not be noticed for more than a thousand years.

Let me give you a few examples to illustrate what I mean. Take the scene from Book I (lines 423-29) when Aeneas and Achates have entered Carthage and are marveling at all of the city construction projects as they climb the hill to the top. Fagles translates this as follows:

The Tyrians press on with the work, some aligning the walls,
struggling to raise the citadel, trundling stones up slopes;
some picking the building sites and plowing out their boundaries,
others drafting laws, electing judges, a senate held in awe.
Here they’re dredging a harbor, there they lay foundations
deep for a theater, quarrying out of rock great columns
to form a fitting scene for stages still to come.
(Book I, lines 513-19, pp. 61-62)

If we look at our manuscript witnesses from the Vatican, we can see that they disagree about a few of the details. Neither one is totally correct; instead, both have to be compared because they equally point back towards their lost original exemplar. Since it may be difficult to read the manuscripts, I’ve written out a transcription of the two texts:

Image found at the Apostolic Library, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3225

Detail from  Vat. f13v [MSS Vat. lat. 3225]. Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

INSTANTARDENTESTYRIIPARSDUCEREMUROS
MOLIRIQUEARCEM·ETMANIBUSSUBUOLUERESAXA
PARSOPTARELOCUMTECTOETCONCLUDERESULCO
IURAMAGISTRATUSQ·LEGUNT·SANCTUMQUESENATUM
HICPORTUSALIIEFFODIUNTHICLATATHEATRIS
FUNDAMENTAPETUNTALIIIMMANISQUECOLUMNAS
RUPIBUSEXCIDUNTSCAENISDECORAALTAFUTURIS˙

Image from the Apostolic Library, Vatican

Detail from Rom. f89v [MSS Vat. lat. 3867] Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

INSTANT·ARDENTES·TYRII·PARS·DUCERE·MUROS
MOLIRI·QUE·ARCEM·ET·MANIBUS·SUBUOLUERE·SAXA
PARS·APTARE·LOCUM·TECTO·ET·CONCLUDERE·SULCO
IURA·MAGISTRATUSQ:LEGUNT·SANCTUM·Q:SENATU
HIC·PORTUS·ALII·EFFODIUNT·HIC·ALTA·THEATRIS·
FUNDAMENTA·LOCANT·ALII·IMMANIS·Q:COLUMNAS
RUPIBUS·EXCIDUNT·SCAENIS·DECORA·ALTA·FUTURIS

Notice that in the third line Rom. has the word aptare, while Vat. has optare. Fagles (or, rather, the edition of the Latin text that Fagles translated) chose to use optare here, since he translates the line as “some picking the building sites.” If he had translated aptare, it would have said something like “fitting the building sites” instead. Yet he chooses against the Vat. text two lines later: the workers “lay foundations / deep for a theater,” matching alta theatris / fundamenta locant. Had he followed the Vat. text, he might have translated lata theatris / fundamenta petunt as “they seek foundations broad for a theater,” which doesn’t make quite as much sense. Still, some editors choose to read the text this other way (cf. Conington 75). Switching alta for lata is probably the scribal equivalent of a “typo.” Mixing up locant and petunt, on the other hand, is harder to explain. We moderns are not the first to notice this discrepancy, however: if you look closely, an early medieval reader has put a little mark that looks like a percentage sign (%) over the word petunt, and noted a correction “LOCANT” in the left-hand margin.

Even if all the manuscripts agree, however, this still doesn’t mean that we have access to the original text as Virgil wrote it: it just means that all of the manuscripts we have are descended from a common source which may not be Virgil’s original. In this same passage given above about city projects from Book I, you may have noticed something strange. The poem focuses here on the physical work of building a city, except for one line. It may not strike you at first, but the central line about “drafting laws” and a “senate held in awe” doesn’t totally match its surroundings, does it? In fact, even though this line appears in this spot in all seven witnesses, some readers from the classical era to the present day doubt that this line was in the original poem, and believe that it was added by a later scribe.

Why should you care about such minutiae as this? There are at least two reasons, the first more general, and the second more specific for Humanities Core. First, what I have said above about how texts change from manuscript to manuscript does not just apply to the Aeneid, or to ancient literature, or to things written by hand. In fact, all texts are subject to this kind of corruption and variation, even texts that might seem totally modern and well-established, which is why many important books are released in critical editions even if they were written in America in the 20th century. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the interaction between Bilbo and Gollum in the first edition of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien compared to the second edition that came out after he had written The Lord of the Rings. There are also differences between the British and American versions of the Harry Potter series. Needless to say, if there are variations in these texts, there are also variations in the various printings and editions of books like Waiting for the Barbarians, The Tempest, and every other thing you will read this year in Humanities Core.

This brings me to the second reason you should care about textual criticism. Let’s say I was writing a paper about the Aeneid and I wanted to make the claim that for Virgil there was an implicit connection between the physical foundation of a city and the institutional foundation of its laws. I might want to use this passage from Book I, since it shows the senate and the laws coming into being at the same moment, even in the same sentence, as the pillars and stones of the city. If I simply quoted this section, however, and my reader knew that the line about the laws was probably added later (or taken from a different section of the poem, see Campbell 161), they could trash my argument, saying it proved nothing because the line wasn’t original to the poem. If, on the other hand, I incorporated textual criticism into my research, I could argue that constructing the law and constructing the city were tied together in the Roman mind, and that this is demonstrated by the fact that some Roman editor or scribe added the line about the laws and the Senate to the original, and most people after that either didn’t notice it as strange or felt that the poem was better or more interesting this way. My argument has changed and deepened from one about Virgil’s psychology – something that is ultimately impossible to prove – to one about critical reception and the history of the Aeneid within Roman culture.

Works Cited

Campbell, A. Y. “Aeneidea.” The Classical Review 52, 2 (Nov. 1938): 161-63. Print.

Conington, John and Virgil. The Works of Virgil with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Vol. II. London: Whittaker & Co., 1876. Print.

Courntey, E. “The Formation of the Text of Virgil.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 28 (1981): 13-29. Print.

Virgil. Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Virgil. Edited by J.B. Greenough. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900. Digital text available online at The Perseus Project. Accessed 30 Aug. 2016. Web.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. Introduction by Bernard Knox. New York, Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Ben Garceau pictureBen Garceau is a scholar of medieval literature with particular interests in early Britain, translation, and critical theory. He received a dual Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University in 2015. His article “Passing Over, Passing On: Survivance in the Translation of Deor by Seamus Heaney and J. L. Borges” is forthcoming in PMLA. When he isn’t leading seminars in Humanities Core, he likes hiking, working on his science fiction novel, and digging through record shops in Los Angeles.

Who We Are, and What We Are Doing Here

The view of Gateway Study Center and Langston Library from across the future Aldrich Park, 1965

The view of Gateway Study Center and Langston Library from across the future Aldrich Park (1965). Image via UCI Department of Chemistry.

First off, I’d like to welcome you to the Humanities Core Course and to this experimental digital space, a curated group blog in which our course director, lecturing faculty, seminar leaders, students, and other members of the university community will reflect on this cycle’s theme of Empire and Its Ruins as well as our practices as writers and researchers in the Humanities at UC Irvine.

I also want to reassure those of you who are new to the idea of college-level writing and research in the humanities that everyone feels apprehensive at the beginning. Moreover, it is natural to find yourself unmoored along the way as your interests and scholarly pursuits develop. To use an old and rather tired cliché, academic research is a journey, not a destination.

When I first arrived at UC Irvine as a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature, I was terrified to venture onto the fifth floor of Langston Library, which houses the world-renowned Critical Theory Archive, a special collection of documents and artifacts that I had indeed come to Irvine in hopes of studying. I felt sure that I would be found out as a fraud, that the librarian would take one look at me and know that I was an academic imposter who was unprepared to examine the treasures she so carefully guarded. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me nearly six months to work up the courage to press the elevator button to the fifth floor. To my amazement, what I eventually found there was not Cerberus but rather a group of brilliant, dedicated archivists eager to share some of our school’s most precious resources with me. They listened to my ideas, asked questions about my project, and made invaluable suggestions about documents that I hadn’t even heard of before. As my thinking evolved, I returned again and again to the archive, often revisiting texts that I had looked at earlier with new eyes and different questions. Years later, it felt particularly fitting that it was on the fifth floor that I filed my doctoral dissertation, adding my own small contribution to the space from which I had learned so much.

In this blog, other members of our Humanities Core community will reflect on their own journeys as researchers and writers. They will tell you about their encounters with libraries and archival spaces and explain how particular artifacts captured their interest. They will introduce you to the exciting new world of scholarly resources online and share digitized archives that you may find helpful as you develop your own research projects in the spring. They will share stories of how they came to work in a particular discipline or interdisciplinary context, as well as detours that their careers took along the way. They will model how to close read artifacts from their own disciplinary perspectives, revealing how historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and art and media scholars might have highly divergent approaches to the same object. Scholars representing a range of interdisciplinary programs in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences—including African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, Comparative Literature, Culture and Theory, European Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Persian Studies—will write about the social and political implications of their research, hopefully helping you to understand how the study of the humanities never takes place in a vacuum and often relates directly to the events that shape contemporary life.

The purpose of this space is twofold. First, we intend to model the kind of socially engaged, evidence-based speculative writing that students in Humanities Core will create in their own blogs over the course of the year. As a student in Core, you can learn a great deal about the appropriate tone and tenor of effective online academic writing from these posts, as well as how to approach an emergent, constantly changing online audience. We encourage you to join in the dialogue and debate that we hope will unfold in the comment section.

Perhaps more importantly, we hope that students in the program can better get to know their librarians, seminar leaders, and faculty lecturers through these posts. We want to demystify the process of doing research in the Humanities at UC Irvine. Even the so-called “experts” face new opportunities and challenges as technology advances and the social conditions in which we work as researchers change. While the various points of view reflected in this space do not necessarily represent UC Irvine or the administration of the Humanities Core Course, they do represent the work of the humanities today: to interpret human artifacts and the cultures from which they originate, to question how humans have understood history and collective agency, and to interrogate structures of marginalization and oppression.

Personally, I am looking forward to our new cycle and an exciting year of conversation with many of you. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.

Tamara BeScreen Shot 2016-08-26 at 3.38.56 PMauchamp is a seminar leader in the Humanities Core Course at UC Irvine, where she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature. When she isn’t hiking at Crystal Cove State Park or proselytizing about Orange County Taco Tuesday venues, she writes about the conjunction between literary modernisms and the clinical development of psychoanalysis, especially as it maps onto questions of race, gender, and sexuality. She will be acting as editor and moderator of this space as it evolves over the next year.