A major piece of this Mellon-funded project is the Intern Blog, which is required of each intern across our nine collective academic institutions. Intern Blogs offer first-hand storytelling from the interns at their community archive sites. Blogs share their experiences, their perspectives on archival practices, their engagement with community archives materials and histories, and their learning from within local communities themselves.
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From Harm to Healing: Creating Trauma-Informed Statements for the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive
By Iori Khuhro, FOCAS Intern, Spring 2025 / University of British Columbia Culture and Identity “The values and norms that connect us to a shared identity and community.”[1] My name is Iori Khuhro, and I am a second-generation Pakistani-Canadian settler born on lands constituting the Treaty and Traditional Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit…
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Dunbar Pavillion: Building a Community Archive, Preserving Voices
By Olivia Carmen Otero, FOCAS Intern, Fall 2024 / University of Arizona The Dunbar School, a modest, two-room structure built in 1918, served as a school for African American Children in Tucson, Arizona. The school underwent several expansions to accommodate its growing student body and faculty until it was desegregated in 1951. Regarded as one…
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Building Tucson’s Mexican American Community Archive
By Jesus Villalobos, FOCAS Intern, Fall 2024 / University of Arizona This semester, I had the unique privilege of serving as the Oral History and Archival Processing Intern at the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum in Tucson, Arizona. The Museum is housed in the historic Sosa-Carrillo House, one of the last remaining homes from…
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Gay Community Services Tucson Activism in the AQA
By Jules Baldino, FOCAS Intern, Fall 2024 / University of Arizona “Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be structured entirely by our past and by our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is our future”…
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Processing process…
By Kelli Luck, FOCAS Intern, Fall 2024 / University of Arizona I was selected to work within the Arizona Queer Archives as a FOCAS Intern in the Fall of 2024. Nestled within the LGBTQ+ Institute at the University of Arizona, the Arizona Queer Archives (AQA) stands as a vital repository of Arizona’s LGBTQ+ history and…