Activist Archivists: Centering Marginalized Campus Voices and Rebuilding Institutional Knowledge through Oral History

The rapidly changing face of the UNH system, retirements spurred by COVID, and a challenging financial environment motivated SCA to restructure the ways that they collect and preserve institutional history. Through a two-year pilot program utilizing a new technology called TheirStory -- which hosts, records, transcribes, and stores interviews -- they began plans to record histories from University leadership, faculty, staff, alumni, and students. This poster recounts how the University Archivist shaped the UNH Oral History Project to fill in the institutional gaps of its past, considers how this project forms a microcosm of his curatorial and collection vision as “activist archivists” who intentionally create spaces to tell underrepresented history, and outlines his plan showing how this decision represents a curatorial intervention that reframes UNH’s history beyond its brick and mortar. Using an interview with a founder of the UNH’s graduate student union as a prism through which SCA considers how to record and preserve institutional knowledge, community history, and legacies of labor advocacy and student activism on campus, this poster addresses each aspect of the project’s development, execution, and planned trajectory. The poster also explores the possibilities, limitations, and insights in operating an oral history program at the intersection of campus community history and institutional history. These two perspectives illuminate a generative, representational tension that this project seeks to balance as an official office that is meant to chronicle the activity of UNH, yet also provide a candid and accurate portrait of community history. This poster aims to display the barriers, ethics, and challenges of conducting oral histories that generate contradictory perspectives, while also emphasizing the institutional need to make reparative steps to provide meaningful glimpses into the lives and stories of the people who shaped campus history.