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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 feminist, queer, and radical 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 dominant narratives?
  • What does it mean to queer an archive or to build an archive of care?
  • How might we archive not only what has been, but what could be?
Get involved: We are shaping programming now — from reading groups and workshops to screenings and collaborative projects. If you’re interested in engaging with the theme, or if you’re already doing work that connects to archives, memory, or imagination, we’d love to hear from you. Share your ideas or projects with us, by emailing us at educationteam@northwestern.edu.

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.