Welcome🥂

In this Manifold project, you will find the final projects created by students in Writing 102: Archives Unbound , taught by Cen Liu during Spring 2024 at Marymount Manhattan College.

Students were asked to build a project either around an existing archive, or a potential archive of their own. In their final work, students uncover less-known lives of familiar individuals, from Hollywood celebrity Elizabeth Taylor, groundbreaking writer Louisa May Alcott to the bizzare company behind Cabbage Patch Kids. They also bring to light stories of people whose fates became entangled with forces of history, such as those who participated in the Stonewall Riots. They take it upon themselves to document community cultures of graffiti artists, theater makers, and thrifting enthusiasts. Further, students tap into the heritages of their family and their city, rediscovering cherished memories of dinner tables and fascinating histories of NYC subways. Finally, they ruminate on their creative journeys in dance, costume design, and fashion.

These explorations in and through archives show diverse experiences of students navigating college lives as they find their academic and creative voices and thread their past memories with future visions. This project on Manifold wish to capture efforts of discovery and moments of exhilaration along the trails.

Some of these projects are primarily texts, others are resource collections. The author's name for each artifact is noted in its title.

This project is under CC BY-NC-ND. Please credit the author of individual work.

🃏The formal archive is jussive, the trace archive is laissez-faire.
The formal archive is deliberately sequential; it marks a commencement before which records were collected....
The trace archive is expressed in duration: it is about habits and customs and place rather than coordinate time and space.
––Geoffrey Bowker, "The Archive."