Mapping Karen Parker's Journal: Student archival interpretation as feminist geographic worldmaking pedagogy

This paper draws on an undergraduate archives project to consider student archival interpretation as a worldmaking feminist geographic pedagogy. In Spring of 2021, we embedded an archives-based digital humanities project into GEOG124: Feminist Geographies. The project had students map, analyze, and contextualize the archival journal of Karen Parker, accomplished journalist and the first Black undergraduate woman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). The journal she kept as a student is a prized archival object in UNC's Wilson Library. In it, she describes her experience as both a student and leader in the Civil Rights movement against Jim Crow segregation. Student work to visualize her journal spatially onto the campus and town landscapes provided new ways to understand university and town histories. Through spatial and temporal interpretation of this archival object, which included consulting and learning from Parker in the present day, students brought together their own experiences of campus life and histories of struggle on their everyday landscapes. Students challenged official progress narratives to center the work of student activists and identified with recent histories more intimately. This project highlights not only archives themselves as worldmaking institutions but the practice of interpreting materials as also worldmaking. • Interacting with and curating archives is a form of worldmaking that shapes how we understand the past and future. • The classroom is a place of praxis where student imagination and action drive transformative learning. • Student archival work is feminist geographic worldmaking that disrupts dominant narratives and official histories. • Archival research on a student journal revealed campus spaces as sites of both oppression and student activism. • Students linked current racial and gender justice struggles tohistorical experiences, drawing powerful connections across time.