Building a Successful (and Flexible) Partnership with UMD's Gymkana Troupe

Presented at the 2016 Library Research and Innovative Practice Forum, this poster provides an overview of a successful partnership between the University of Maryland Archives and UMD's Gymkana Troupe to publicize Gymkana's 70th anniversary and to digitize the troupe's holdings in the Archives. Gymkana is an exhibition gymnastics troupe founded on campus in 1946 which runs a variety of educational and healthy-living outreach programs. Various stages of the project are highlighted, including an exhibit in McKeldin Library, a LaunchUMD fundraising campaign, and the troupe's participation in metadata creation for digital objects. By maintaining an open and flexible dialogue throughout the project planning and execution, both the library and the troupe members ultimately benefited from this collaboration.

Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community: Native Hawaiian Claims to Selfhood and Home

In 1898 the United States illegally annexed the Hawaiian Islands over the protests of Queen Liliʽuokalani and the Hawaiian people. American hegemony has been deepened in the intervening years through a range of colonizing practices that alienate Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaiʽi, from their land and culture. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community is an exploration of contemporary Hawaiian peoplehood that reclaims indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity from colonizing narratives of nation and race. Drawing from archival holdings at the University of Hawaiʽi, Mānoa and in-depth interviews, this project offers an analysis of public and everyday discourses of nation, race, and peoplehood to trace the discursive struggle over Local identity and politics. A context-specific social formation in Hawaiʽi, “Local” is commonly understood as a multiethnic identity that has its roots in working-class, ethnic minority culture of the mid-twentieth century. However, American discourses of race and, later, multiethnicity have functioned to render invisible the indigenous roots of this social formation. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community reclaims these roots as an important site of indigenous resistance to American colonialism. It traces, on the one hand, the ways in which Native Hawaiian resistance has been alternately erased and appropriated. On the other hand, it explores the meanings of Local identity to Native Hawaiians and the ways in which indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity enabled a thriving community under conditions of colonialism.