On July 3rd, 2018, members of the UCHRI-sponsored multi-campus working group, “University and State in the Americas,” a research collective affiliated with University and State, met at UCSD to carry out a collaborative archival research project. The goal was to visit the library’s Special Collections to investigate holdings that depicted the occupation of campus buildings by students and activists during the late 60s and into the 70s. Each group member waded into a few boxes of the “UC San Diego Archives” collection. The advantage of this particular archive was the way that the history conveyed by newspaper clippings, fragments from administrators, student groups, publicity for events on campus, and protest actions was, in a sense, our own history as PhD students at various campuses of the University of California. We swapped the more obvious mode of entering an archive – with established research questions that, come what may in the act of discovery, at least served to offer a thematic frame of reference for study – for the possibility of our exploration being driven exclusively by our flights of fancy, our boredom, and the guidance of our unconscious concerns, insofar as these were at least in part the product of our position as graduate students. Our goal was to experiment with collective research. What exactly that entailed was itself a bit of a mystery when we began. Whether or not it remains so is attested by the writing that resulted:
Ana Baginski, “Sexual Assault in the John Muir College Residential Life Handbook: A reading”
Addison Palacios: “No Preference (for quotes from Milton)”
Williston Chase: “Headlining an ongoing revolt: UCSD public relations files, 1979”
These were clearly tumultuous times for the university system of which each of the exercise’s participants forms or formed part. Nevertheless, reading about them in this way brought to light the fragility of the collectives involved. In his contribution, group member Addison Palacios remarks that encountering the mix of formal and informal materials gathered together in these boxes presented the archive itself as “a non-discerning repository of traces,” requiring the reader to import the revolution, as it were, in order to read it clearly therein, but also ignore the revolutionary, if circumstances conspire for them to do so. In the end it seemed that our own collective project was subject to similar waxes and wanes of fervor.