Curating Visual Archives of Sex

In this roundtable, four curators of exhibitions showcasing sexual archives and histories—with a particular focus on queer and trans experiences—were asked to reflect on their experiences working as scholars and artists across a range of museum and gallery formats. The exhibitions referred to below were Bring Your Own Body: Transgender between Archives and Aesthetics, curated by Jeanne Vaccaro (discussant) with Stamatina Gregory at The Cooper Union, New York, in 2015 and Haverford College, Pennsylvania, in 2016; Odarodle: An imaginary their_story of naturepeoples, 1535–2017, curated by Ashkan Sepahvand (discussant) at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin, Germany, in 2017; Queer, curated by Ted Gott, Angela Hesson, Myles Russell-Cook, Meg Slater (discussant), and Pip Wallis at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, in 2022; and TransTrans: Transatlantic Transgender Histories, curated by Alex Bakker, Rainer Herrn, Michael Thomas Taylor, and Annette F. Timm (discussant) at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, Germany, in 2019–20, adapting an earlier exhibition shown at the University of Calgary, Canada, in 2016.

The Peacebuilding Endeavours of Daniel Oliver and the Palestine Watching Committee in Mandate Palestine, 1930-48

This paper analyses the peacebuilding efforts of the official British Religious Society of Friends representative in Mandate Palestine, Daniel Oliver, and the Palestine Watching Committee (PWC). Previously unexamined documentation stored in the Friends House library and Haverford College archives details the extensive negotiations by Oliver and the PWC, which he co-founded, to influence British, Arab and Jewish senior political and royal officials. Combining individual and collective Quaker values concerning the Peace Testimony with a deep focus on British government colonial policies proved problematic. Internal fractions developed over the conduct of British forces in Palestine and the issue of Jewish immigration. Oliver defended the British government and continued to press for peace, demonstrating how patriotism significantly influenced his own spiritually guided message, while the PWC reduced its activities and became despondent over their lack of success and the decline of the Mandate.

Challenging a ‘Warist’ Society with Digital Peace Pedagogy

This article offers strategies for a peace pedagogy that is informed by combining techniques from feminist theory and peace studies with the digital humanities. Here we describe how the first-year Writing Seminar “Peace Testimonies in Literature & Art,” taught in Spring 2017 at Haverford College, collaborated with the activist organization the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to participate in the collection and curation of oral histories projects. In this class, students conducted oral history interviews of peace activists at the 2017 AFSC symposium “Waging Peace: AFSC’s Summit for Peace and Justice” (April 20-23 in Philadelphia, PA), and then analyzed the videos of these interviews through OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) and the video editing software Camtasia. Here we discusses how feminist, digital, and peace pedagogies can be combined to help students recover the lost histories of pacifist activism.

Troubled Waters: Tracing Globalization and Waste in the Delaware River

ABSTRACT In spring 2014, an interdisciplinary media project titled “Troubled Waters: Tracing Waste in the Delaware River” was organized at Haverford College. This project brought together more than 50 students from four courses comprising introductory political science, chemistry, and documentary film students, as well as a community media artist and community partners. The aim was to explore the causes, impacts, and meanings of different types of waste that are polluting the Delaware River. Chemistry students collected samples to determine the presence of chemicals from various waste products, political science students traced the waste to globalized production processes, and documentary students explored diverse ways of representing the theme of waste on screen. This article describes the project and how it might serve as a pedagogical model for multicourse interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement.

Bergson(-ism) Remembered: A Roundtable

Bergson(ism) Remembered: A RoundtableCurated by Mark William Westmoreland with Brien Karas (Villanova University, USA)Featuring Jimena Canales (University of Illinois-UC, USA), Stephen Crocker (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada), Charlotte De Mille (The Courtauld Gallery, UK), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University, USA), Michael Foley (University of Westminster, UK), Hisashi Fujita (Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan), Suzanne Guerlac (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Melissa McMahon (Independent Scholar, Australia), Paulina Ochoa Espejo (Haverford College, USA), and Frédéric Worms (L’École Normale Supérieure, France)

Changing the Subject: Archives, Technology, and Radical Counter-Narratives of Peace

This article argues that performing the recovery of pacifist art and actions through archival research of the modernist era encourages students to engage in radical ethical inquiry. Based on four sections of a writing class at Haverford College, this article walks the reader through the construction of a student digital humanities and special collections exhibition, Testimonies in Art & Action: Igniting Pacifism in the Face of Total War, which ran from October 6 to December 11, 2015 in Haverford College’s Magill Library. The exhibition placed archival materials in conversation with the major modernist pacifist documentary projects of Langston Hughes’s Spanish Civil War poetry and dispatches, Muriel Rukeyser’s “Mediterranean,” Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. This undertaking was driven by the questions, “How does one respond ethically to total war?” and “How can archival and special collections research do the works of peace?” Built around the work of these classes and materials from Haverford’s Quaker & Special Collections, Testimonies in Art & Action allowed students to deeply interrogate a variety of pacifisms and become producers of a critical discourse that challenges the status quo position that violence is perpetually necessary and the most important aspect of world history.