Julie C. Bates and Sarah Warren-Riley
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
The Activist Archival Project we assign in our classes is well-suited for a composition course with an emphasis on writing for social change, community-engaged writing, and/or social justice. In this project, students work either in person or online documenting examples of social or environmental interventions occurring in their communities. Students actively engage in archiving local activist work, including photos and videos taken of street art installations, local protests, and other on-the-ground efforts; social media posts; screenshots of activist websites; news coverage featuring activists; and more. This project offers a multitude of possibilities for students to collect data and stories related to community activist efforts and allows one means of archiving and contributing to activists’ online and on-the-ground action, supporting what activists are doing without getting in the way of their important work. During the project, students are tasked with a number of different writing and research assignments, including writing proposals for which efforts they intend to focus on and why; collecting artifacts and compiling metadata; and writing an analysis essay in which students look for themes, threads, and concepts that emerged from the artifacts collected.