The PAA is a scaffolded, multi-part assignment that empowers students to assert their presence in the archives. Students combat systemic annihilation and foster personal well-being by assembling a collection of items and metadata that makes up their Personal Archive.

The PAA directs students to select items which communicate and document their experience/s during 2020 and beyond. The prompts, combined with salient student experiences, highlight living through the COVID-19 pandemic, the most recent #BLM uprising and protests, and other events.

Along with helping students record and critically engage with their lived reality, this assignment has several purposes:

• To help students explore what an archive is, understand how archives are political, and that archives are often the product of heteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacist institutions

• To introduce the concept of symbolic annihilation and then imagine how creating a personal archive can counter systemic forces that silence, erase, deny, and minimize

• To help students develop an understanding of intersectional analysis, utilizing it as a lens to interrogate mass movement, other, and self

• To build radical empathy, both in and out of the classroom