Re/Collecting Futures: Archives, Memory, and Imagination
Re/Collecting Futures: Archives, Memory, and Imagination
What do we choose to remember? Who decides what is preserved? And how might the act of keeping become a site of resistance, healing, and imagination?
This year, the Education Team will explore these questions through Re/Collecting Futures, our 2025–2026 thematic focus. Drawing on many archival traditions, this initiative approaches archives not as static repositories of the past, but as dynamic sites of storytelling, refusal, and possibility.
Throughout the year, we’ll invite the community into conversations and creative practices that reimagine archives — from institutional collections to personal keepsakes, from speculative “what if” archives to embodied and ephemeral acts of remembrance. Together, we’ll ask:
- How can archives disrupt commonly held narratives?
- What does it mean to build an archive of care?
- How might we archive not only what has been, but what could be?
Program Offerings and Highlights
Work in Progress: Archiving the Self Workshop
November 12, 1–2:30 p.m. | 1800 Sherman, Suite 5200, Evanston, IL
This October, as we celebrate LGBTQ History Month, we’re reminded that archives are acts of resistance—they make visible what might otherwise be erased, forgotten, or deemed “not important enough” to preserve. The work of documenting lives, labor, and legacies are a paramount practice.
In that spirit, we invite Northwestern community members to “Work in Progress: Archiving the Self”—a reflective mini-workshop that reframes your everyday work as archive-worthy. You don’t have to be an artist to be an archivist of your life. Through emails, late-night problem solving, mentorship moments, and the systems that you’ve quietly built, you’re already creating a record of care, growth, and values.
In this session, you’ll
- Reflect on how your work and roles have evolved over time
- Recognize the “invisible archive” you already keep
- Write a letter to your present self—from past or future you
Drawing inspiration from artists and thinkers like Octavia E. Butler and Sister Corita Kent, we'll explore how showing up, learning through doing, and speaking encouragement to ourselves becomes its own kind of legacy.
This workshop honors the truth that some of the most important work happens in the margins—and it deserves to be remembered.
Zines have long been tools of resistance and cultural preservation, circulated by those pushed to the margins to share knowledge and imagine otherwise. Whether you're new to reflective practice or a seasoned journal-keeper, all are welcome.
Re/Collecting Futures | From the Film Archive: WOLFEN (1981)
October 15, 7–9:00 p.m. | Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
As part of our Re/Collecting Futures theme, we’re highlighting this archival gem from the Block Museum’s film series: WOLFEN (1981), a rare and riveting 35mm screening of Michael Wadleigh’s only narrative feature.
Part horror thriller, part urban fable, WOLFEN conjures a haunted vision of 1980s New York—grappling with gentrification, environmental collapse, and the lingering specters of colonial violence. Through its grainy textures and genre-bending ambition, the film offers more than thrills; it invites reflection on what we bury and what returns.
We see this screening as a cinematic entry point into archival memory—reminding us that films, too, are repositories of the fears, myths, and questions that shape our collective futures.
Living Values, Living Archives
Values are more than guiding principles; they are the threads that connect our past, present, and imagined futures. They remind us of our purpose and shape how we move through the world together.
This year, the Education Team invites you to step into the archive—not as a static collection, but as a living site of memory, possibility, and reimagination. Here, we uncover traces of courage, integrity, curiosity, stewardship, and abundance. Some of these traces may feel familiar, drawn from the places and people who have shaped Northwestern. Others reach beyond campus, carrying echoes from struggles and solidarities across time and place.
By engaging these fragments, we practice what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: weaving what is known with what is possible, what has been with what might yet be. In doing so, we hope to spark reflection, conversation, and creative engagement. How might our values, anchored in our collective past, alive in the present—help us move with greater intention toward a more just and abundant future?
- Courage: In the archive, courage often hides in the margins: a handwritten note in the corner of a flyer, the quiet insistence of a name signed to a petition, the persistence of someone who showed up again and again. These traces remind us that courage is rarely spectacular—it is sustained. In our present, courage means not only facing difficulty, but doing so with thoughtfulness and care. Looking forward, it calls us to experiment with new forms of collaboration, to risk imagining futures not yet recognized as possible.
- Integrity: Integrity emerges in the archive through consistency across time: the principles that guided an organization through struggle, the letters that document accountability even when it was difficult. Integrity in our present moment asks us to hold alignment between values and actions, to let our commitments be legible in our daily choices. In the future, integrity invites us to invent structures of accountability that are not punitive but sustaining, ensuring that our moral compass is attuned to collective flourishing.
- Curiosity: In the archive, curiosity is the act of keeping: someone once thought this fragment might matter, even if they weren’t sure why. Each kept scrap is an invitation to wonder. Curiosity today requires us to remain open to uncertainty, to unlearn the rush to “get it right,” and to welcome surprise as a teacher. In the future, curiosity asks us to imagine knowledge itself differently—not as mastery, but as an endless unfolding we undertake together.
- Stewardship: The archive teaches stewardship in its very form: materials cared for, preserved, tended across generations. Yet every archive is also fragile, reminding us that stewardship is never permanent but always an act of responsibility. In the present, stewardship means caring for our relationships—with each other, with the more-than-human world—and acting with intentionality toward sustainability and justice. In the future, stewardship becomes intergenerational: planting seeds of care that others will inherit and reimagine.
- Abundance: The archive is abundant not because it is complete, but because it overflows with possibility. Fragments, when placed in relation, multiply meaning. Abundance in the present means sharing resources, amplifying bright spots, and approaching our work from a place of collaboration rather than scarcity. Looking forward, abundance calls us to invent new economies of generosity, to imagine futures where wealth is measured in connection, care, and collective thriving.