Publications and Research
Archival Inversions: Rethinking Knowledge Infrastructures through the CUNY Distance Learning Archive
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2023
Abstract
In the spring of 2020, doctoral students at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center produced a collective intervention in the knowledge infrastructures of the largest public university system in the United States. The CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA) sought to document and bridge the lived experiences of faculty, staff, and students—particularly immigrant and working-class undergraduates—across the 25 campuses comprising the CUNY system. The archive’s three public-facing collections span the closure of the university, the transition to remote teaching and learning, and the resulting activism of the #CutCOVIDNotCUNY movement pushing against austerity in public higher education. These collections therefore highlight the various tension spaces made visible by the breakdown and maintenance of university infrastructure during this time of crisis. Here, the CDLA builds on the concept of infrastructural inversion by enacting a kind of “archival inversion” that inscribes these fissures into our institutional memory as a public university. By putting in conversation otherwise disjunctured constituencies and discourses, the collections in the archive offer an opportunity to rethink the relational nature of infrastructure and the frozen dialectics that are made visible by moments of crisis. This article takes the infrastructural interventions of the CDLA collections as a starting point to explore questions surrounding digital archival approaches to times of crisis and how these endeavours might facilitate prefigurative politics and memory-making practices.
Comments
This article was originally published in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, available at https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.9673
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).