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Community Narratives: Uncovering Hidden Perspectives

Welcome to Community Narratives: Uncovering Hidden Perspectives!

The mission of this exhibit is to highlight a small portion of the perspectives that are hidden in our on-campus archives. Events that played pivotal roles in social and political movements have been well-documented in the archives and libraries located at the University of Texas at Austin. For many reasons, many of these conflicts have been hidden from the public eye. We have set out to shine a spotlight on these social inequities within the university's archival collections to provide a voice to these previously underrepresented narratives.

Exploring the Site

Collections are sets of items that all have a commonality in their origin or topic. Exhibits include collections and/or items accompanied by additional contextual information, all arranged in a cohesive manner to communicate a narrative. You can start exploring this digital archive by browsing through the different exhibits, collections, or items. Use the "browse by tags" function to see how the themes of separate items and collections interconnect.

About This Project

This online digital archive was created by the students of Dr. Elon Lang's LAH/HMN350 course, Treasure Hunt in the Campus Archives: Giving Voice to Hidden Histories. In this class, students engaged in direct archival research with collections related to social justice at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, and LLILAS Benson Latin American Collection. Students learned about the theoretical approaches to archiving, as well as the role of archives as active cultural heritage institutions. The interrelated Omeka exhibits are part of the students' collaborative capstone projects, which in 2020 also included revamping and building upon the work of the previous year's class. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, this class had the added challenge of building a collaborative website while being separated by distance for the latter half of the semester. Through Zoom meetings and online collaboration, this iteration of the website is particularly special because of the resilience and creativity required to develop it. Nevertheless, this site aims to showcase some of the University's lesser-known archival holdings and to contextualize the archival material with research the students conducted in the University's libraries.