Recently I’ve been part of a project to building a timeline and set of resources on resistance, direct action and organizing across the history of UW-Milwaukee. This is based on examination of archives at the UWM Library, as well as interviews with past participants. The timeline describes civil rights mobilization, anti-war efforts, labor organizing, the establishment and progress of the Black Student Union, alter-globalization movement on campus, Latin American solidarity campaigns, the Palermo Boycott movement, Gay Liberation Organization, police accountability efforts and many other efforts across UWM’s sixty year history. These resources have currently informed several off-campus discussions as well as a walking tour that explored some of the contentious sites of resistance.

For this session, I’m proposing a discussion on ways to use digital resources to make these resources more accessible, building tools to make forgotten moments of resistance be visible to more people, in ways that can inform current activism, organization and teaching. I am interested in broadening and expanding the process of research and presentation, to be able to spread awareness of extraordinary moments in the campus history. Such resources can also be a tool to explore the underlying structures that have created success and failure for various attempts to shift power within the university.

For format, this would  involve a 10 minute presentation on some of the content that has been currently gathered, followed by extended open discussion on ways to expand the virtual presence for such materials.