History Student Exhibit Wins Major Prize

“Students Speak Out” exemplifies community engaged public history at its best. Through collaboration between students, faculty, and community members, the project equips students with the practical and philosophical proficiencies that drive robust civic discourse. The project invites both students and the larger community to engage in place-based inquiry and reflection. The project required students to consider student life in generative ways by exploring archival material and engaging with past campus activists. This is an especially significant pedagogical practice for undergraduate education. In addition to student impact, the project also benefitted the larger university community by contextualizing a longer history of activism at the University of Minnesota. It fosters reflection on the past as well as imagined futures, ultimately equipping students to step into roles as organizers and changemakers. 

The project additionally invites the wider community to engage with hitherto untouched histories and ideas of the Midwestern past. Institutional histories are often hagiographic. This bottom-up institutional history critically examines the role of universities in dissent (or not). The digital component, especially the ArcGIS portions, promote longer term, accessible content whilst guiding the reader through a series of reflective questions. The project helps students revisit their own positionality, privilege, and community relationships, whilst also exploring the utility of public history as a tool for creating empowered and engaged civic discourse. The emphasis on continuing this learning journey is both novel and sustainable. Pedagogically, the project nurtures students’ taking ownership of their learning but doing so in new ways that rely on place-based engagement. Overall, “Student Activism at the University of Minnesota” enriches Midwestern history by enmeshing place-based queries with institutional and global histories.

I'm grateful to the Midwestern History Association for honoring our team’s work with an award and to the History Department for supporting my attendance at the conference. That type of support makes a huge difference for students like me by creating opportunities to connect with fellow researchers and academics. Seeing the work we did on Students Speak Out in conversation with broader Midwestern histories reinforced the value of hyperlocal research like ours. It was especially enriching to engage with historians sharing their work and collaborating on important local and regional history. I was inspired by the conference’s emphasis on public history and by the connections being made between communities, researchers, and institutions across the Midwest.

Talia Magnuson