Write up a summary at the end of the week reflecting on the readings, and your initial thoughts on Special Collections and any burning questions you may have. I’m also interested in hearing what sticks out to you as interesting or fun, if there is something you’d like mention. Feel free to post this on the blog
I’ll begin with reflecting on my first “official” foray into Special collections, which came by way of perusing the webpages related to special collections. I paid minimal heed to the pages giving mechanical instructions (e.g. how to find materials on catalyst, book appointments and class visits) on my first go around, but post Erickson’s reading I think they are worth heavier consideration. On my first pass, my interest was imprisoned in the webpages highlighting collections of note. Prior to this, my interactions with Special Collections have revolved around maps, codecis, and manuscripts (all interactions through class visits). But that was not what dominated the highlighted collections. Evidently, these collections came in a small variety of flavors, but by and large, they were all made from and for an Anglo-American palate. Usually, the collections are eponymous with their donors who gave works of importance to mainstream histories of the Americas and Europe including one that extolls the “highlights of European Civilization”. Pairing the contents of collections to their donators (alumni/friends of the college) makes the homogeneity less surprising as the donors amassed their collections and exercised their generosity during the early to mid-20th century when diversity of thought was not likely a pursuit of the college.
I don’t know if those donors and past special collection curators each have their own ghosts that haunt us, or if they all coalesce into the gentleman’s ghost that Jesse Ryan Erickson’s piece works to exorcise.
Erickson traces the history of special collection design as it arises from the nouveau riches of the gilded age and the desire to reflect a learned American aristocracy through the creation of an “ideal study”. The colonial and imperial impulses reverberate in the ways reading rooms are designed and policed, and in the ways primary source research is rarified. All these tensions (present for those who were never meant to enter these spaces) pool together in the spatiality of reading rooms to elicit what Erickson calls “the reading room effect” or the inducement of double consciousness.
I was drawn to this cagey relationship between the spatiality of the reading room and the construction of identity as it explained well the out-of-placeness feeling I have in spaces around Carleton. I think the same ghosts that haunt special collections roam around campus grounds. Carleton’s bucolic campus is no exception. Stuart Hall’s quote that “identities are about questions using the resources of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being,” brought to mind the ways in which the discourses surrounding spaces are as important as the spaces themselves. The same is true for identities. For example, in the cases of students like me, we are perhaps by semantic diction first-generation, low-income, under-represented minority students before we arrive on campus, but we are only made into those by the way we are handled during our four years here.
I know we talked a little bit about the aspect of supervision during class visits, and this (unfinished?) conversation kept bouncing around my head during Erickson’s conjuration of the panopticon and the policing of non-white, non-male bodies. Reframing the “management” of researchers/viewers of special collections items to guidance and assistance certainly is easier to swallow, but I wonder what the difference looks like in practice.
I appreciate Erickson’s redress to the question of theory’s applicability. Borrowing from bell hook’s, Erickson conjoins the discourse born out of theory (which can itself come from lived experience) with the practice enacted by said discourse. Connecting that loop was important in allowing me to see and properly recognize the call-to-action Erickson ends on. I am staunchly on the side of calling theory for theory’s sake a useless (and probably impossible) endeavor. I’ve heard the social sciences described as an emancipatory field given its connection to social justice and activism, and critical special collections design seems to be equally deserving of the emancipatory descriptor.
I think the questions I want to ask are not ones that have easy answers, but I’ll ask them anyways:
- Have there been any surveys, reflections, or internal studies about the reading-room effect at Carleton? If not, what would it take to carry them out?
- I assume most students come only in class visits, wonder too how that affects their experience.
- What would pragmatic recontextualization look like for us?
- Who are the decision makers when it comes to selecting and customizing the spatiality of special collections?
- Has there been a reversal or abandonment of Erickson’s ideas in light of the current crusade against DEI efforts?