Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Politics and International Relations

Reader 1

Nancy Neiman

Reader 2

heidi rhodes

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

Systems of personal archiving are integral to my process of living and surviving ableism. My longest running series is my written archives, which encompass 34 notebooks of 210 pages each. I have maintained these for a little over a decade and the number of notebooks continues to grow. The audience for my notebooks is myself. As much as I write about recent experiences, I also detail the process of getting to those experiences and the impact of those experiences on my life after the fact. The archiving process is inseparable from my process of living, both in terms of producing the archives and interfacing with the archives. I use the archives to “plan out loud;” make the decisions about my health I must navigate daily; and also to record in real time how my values, politics, and convictions evolve.

The notebooks resource me with a landscape of selves, as each contribution is written by a self that has changed just a little bit from the last contribution. The notebooks allow me to engage in dialogue with my past selves, all of whom have different perspectives and insight to offer me. My written archives are the most long-standing, but I also produce other types of archives, including logs of my time through the time-tracing app Now Then. My relationship with app has not always supported my health, and it has taken me several years to develop a way of engaging with my logs that is not maladaptive.

The two questions that guide me as I pursue this work are: How does having and producing the archives protect my life? How have I taken an active role in shaping and structuring the production of my personal crip archives with the knowledge that both I and the archives exist within the context of systems of oppression?

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