Featured student: Elena Shaw, SLU Class of 2024

This summer I have had the good fortune to work in depth on Spanish political stickers in my collection with a rising senior, Elena (Ellie) Shaw. I got to know Ellie last spring when she was a contributing writer for the Weaving the Streets & People’s History Archive that I oversee with John Collins from SLU. You can see her posts from her off-campus study in Spain at Lavapiés: The Perfect Place for Rebellion; Incendiary Commentary: The Ninots of Las Fallas, Valencia; and The Battle for Quinta Torres Arias: from Common Ground to Private Playground. While in Spain, Ellie also…

Weaving the Streets & People’s History Archive

What is our “people’s history archive of street culture” going to look like? Street culture is a ubiquitous form of expression that resists easy definition. Our people’s history archive of street culture will document the creative and complex ways in which ordinary people make use of public space. For our project, city-based street culture includes but is not limited to public performances, graffiti, painted murals, neighborhood gardens, parks, urban reclamation projects, political demonstrations, and any other public gatherings. Other suburban and/or rural “ground up” initiatives, such as farm-to-fork community-supported agriculture (CSA) projects, could also be represented in our people’s history…

“The People’s Archive” instructional notes

Below are the notes I sent to the Weaving the Streets & People’s Archives team members today, focusing on the People’s Archive component of the project. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting “The archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society.  But I will stick…

Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive – December 2013

Our first Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive press release. Introduction Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive (WSPA) is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary collaborative project that offers St. Lawrence University students, alumni, and others the opportunity to be part of a dynamic, global, investigative blog and a digital archive that document the creative range of ways in which ordinary people make use of public space to express themselves.  The goal is to bring together examples from a wide range of cultures and experiences so that people can build bridges, explore lines of solidarity and difference, and learn from the experiences of…

Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben

One of my students at SLU, Carolyn Dellinger ’16, is starting to catalogue the Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben that I scanned over the summer (see Berlin-based sticker collections in previous post).  From 79 original raw scans, I came up with a total of 48 edited image files consisting of 16 complete stickers, 4 full sheets of “pre-Photoshop” color-separated stickers, and various individual color-separated stickers and overlays.  Carolyn also created seven image files that are diptychs or triptychs to show the color separations side by side.  The 54 image files in this set can be viewed on my Flickr…

“Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive”

Stickerkitty is collaborating with The Weave: Mediocracy Unspun on a new project entitled Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive (WSPA).  John Collins, professor of global studies at St. Lawrence University and co-founder of the Weave, and I put together a proposal to create “a new blog and digital archive that will document the creative ways in which ordinary people make use of public space to express themselves” (excerpted from our proposal abstract).  We learned on Monday that our proposal was accepted and will be funded for the first two years by a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Crossing Boundaries: Re-Envisioning…