Home » Uncategorized
Category Archives: Uncategorized
LaGuardia Archivist and Linguist Find New Perspective for COVID-19 Asian Oral History Project
Byline: Irene Gashurov/staff writer, OLS.
A successful collaboration between assistant professor archivist Thomas Cleary and linguistics professor Tomonori Nagano at LaGuardia Community College will ensure the pandemic stories of the college’s Southeast Asian and South Asian students will be preserved while, at the same time, providing a wider lens onto this Asian community that is often known only by stereotype.
The co-operation between these two academics-turned-oral historians is through LaGuardia Library’s “COVID-19 Asian Oral History Project” project in which they worked together to incorporate students’ stories into the library’s archives during this momentous period.
LaGuardia’s involvement began in the early days of the lockdown with Nagano checking in on his bilingualism class students to see how they were managing. Like most people during the lockdown, the students talked about the isolation and uncertainty commonly felt at the time. In other ways the reactions of the Asian students to the crisis were different. The Asian students at LaGuardia, who were from mostly from South and Southeast Asia, talked about the disruption of contact with their families abroad and the dearth of public health information for their communities in their native languages—Bengali, Nepali, Tagalog, Tibetan, and Urdu. Nagano began recording their stories on video. “The purpose was not to solve a problem,” he said, “I wanted to listen to them and see what issues they had.”
When Cleary learned of Nagano’s work, he saw a chance to document an Asian population that had largely been missing from LaGuardia’s archives. “I wanted to give them representation so that our archives fully reflect our students,” said Cleary. In Fall 2021, thanks to a PSC-CUNY Grant, the team began work on the “COVID-19 Asian Oral History Project,” a video and multimedia archive of pandemic stories. Two research assistants, Mariana Lopez de Castilla and Joyce Ma, with backgrounds in oral history and community organizing, conducted the video interviews.
Like discoveries that come about when someone finds something they were not looking for, the Asian Oral History Project revealed something essential about the lens of race. When separated from class, religion, education, and immigration status, race alone was too narrow to understand the students’ experiences and their basic humanity. Starting out, the team had assumed that because the pandemic hit people of color harder, the students would want to talk about race. Some had experienced Asian hate, others did not. Mostly they talked about shock, coping, along with their hope and aspirations, what they had done to help their community, and what was important to them.
“We need to consider more than just race,” said Nagano of the project that defied expectations. “It’s always some interaction with something else.” He said the team will pursue their future oral history work through the lens of intersectionality, a concept referring to the complex way that different forms of discrimination crisscross and affect people.
The Asian Oral History Project has completed 30 oral history videos thus far. “We still see the need to provide Asian students the space to speak about their experiences, especially with the increase of attacks we are seeing. At the same time, we are widening the focus of the project to students from all backgrounds and identities,” said Cleary. They are working with different community organizations, like the Queens Memory Project, a community archiving program at Queens Public Library and Queens College, and involving more people and communities in creating their own public record. They are opening the project to all CUNY students and hope to combine the online exhibit of video recordings, images, and essays with public programming.
“We enjoy building bridges between isolated components,” said Nagano of their work. “We like doing interviews and discovering missing links.”
A Philosopher in the Makerspace
Byline: Irene Gashurov/staff writer, OLS.
If you’ve visited Queens College’s Rosenthal Library lately, you may have noticed a room outfitted with equipment—arts and crafts supplies, sewing machines, 3-D printers, and laser cutters, to name a few. The room is not just an engineering outpost. It is a makerspace, a collaborative learning facility where students of different technological aptitudes can experiment, tinker with technology, and build what they learn in the classroom, free from the pressure of failure. Students of all majors can try out their abilities to become designers, builders, and technical operators.
Making is about thinking with your hands and transforming what the mind imagines into products. At Queens College, the QC Makerspace works like a craft shop for students to experiment on equipment that the QC Makerspace offers training on and the resources to learn in the way they want. A computer science student learns to solder and builds a clock from second-hand “nixie tube” parts. An English student recreates a coin she read about in Ovid and gives it the right texture with a laser cutter/etcher. An anthropology student replicates a 3,000-year-old Egyptian boardgame, using non-electric hand tools to sculpt and carve it like those ancient Egyptians used. Students in this environment take an active role in their education. The role of the teacher takes a back seat, stewarding the facility, mentoring, and supporting students through a Socratic exchange of ideas and knowledge.
At Queens College, this kind of teacher is Nick Normal, the inaugural director of the QC Makerspace. An artist, writer, and maker, Normal has been working on maker-aligned initiatives since the movement first burgeoned in San Mateo in 2006, and then spread to businesses, libraries, community centers, and colleges. Normal helped launch the World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. As one of the core production crew, and its only New Yorker, Normal increased attendance at the Faire from 25,000 over a weekend in 2010 to 90,000 attendees paying to see 3D-printed cars and fighting drones over a weekend in 2017.
The rise of the maker movement captured the zeitgeist of the country in transition. From a culture of consumerism, the maker movement emerged as a white knight, promoting resource sharing, do-it-yourself agency, and civic innovation. Makerspaces promised grassroots economic growth from sharing expensive equipment and producing a culture of innovators and entrepreneurs. “When I look back on the maker movement, those were pivotal years,” Normal said. “There was so much overlap and spillage and interoperability between places that were previously siloed.”
As the maker movement spilled over into the academe, pioneering libraries mapped out the future direction of non-profit makerspaces. The DeLaMare Library Makerspace at the University of Nevada, Reno, was first to offer a single 3-D printer, while the Fayetteville Free Library in Syracuse, the first to incorporate a makerspace in a public library. Inspired by these examples, Normal assumed the director position at Queens College in 2018. His audience were now students, of mixed technological aptitudes, but he adapted, and finds approaches unique to each student. “With students in STEM or STEAM-aligned trajectories, you can get them to understand what a robotic drawing arm is, but when you get to a student with little tech skills it can be a little more nebulous,” he said. “I try to find examples that align with their practice or try to get them to understand the openness of access in a makerspace. That’s the underpinning of the makerspace cultural ethos.” A steep learning curve can follow, an application of an empirical science and memorization of facts are involved, as well as experimenting with tools and techniques. But the payoff is worth it. After students have figured out how to apply that knowledge across platforms, “you’ve gotten a lot more room for interpreting the modern world we live in,” said Normal.
To use the space, students sign up for an orientation of the facility. Currently there are 328 lifetime members since the makerspace opened in 2018. Normal and his assistants are on hand to provide mentoring, workshops in anything from computer-aided design to 3D printing and oversee safety. Normal would like to see the makerspace operable beyond regular lab hours and communities to form around sharing, but he lacks the staff.
He remains optimistic. Knowing what can happen when we provide the environment for makerspaces to flourish, he sees great promise when students from different disciplines come together to work out common problems. “What I’m trying to do is get students who come into the makerspace to interoperate as humans,” he said. “I’m trying to get the computer scientists to talk to the anthropologists, and the biologists to talk to the engineers so that they can work on something together with their collective expertise to solve problems confronting students and community.”
RSS - Posts
