It may surprise you to learn that the first documented student-led demands for a stand-alone sexual violence policy at McGill were in 1991. That same year the Native Awareness Coalition, a student group organizing around Indigenous issues on campus, first called to change the name of the McGill’s men’s varsity athletics teams due to its use as an anti-Indigenous slur.
Student Activism on Campus
If you didn’t know about the long history of student organizing around sexual violence or Indigenous issues on campus, you’re not alone. As iMPACTS research assistants, we only learned about the origins of these student movements after spending significant time in the library, pouring over the pages of old student newspapers. Even some of the student activists that we interviewed as part of our research were unaware of how long students had been organizing around these issues. This kind of forgetfulness is the result of many factors. First, student organizations rarely have the capacity to document their work. Second, students graduate, and it is challenging for them to pass on institutional knowledge. Third, the McGill University archives tend not to prioritize the inclusion of student materials. These factors, among others, have serious implications on student activism, present and future.
In recent years, as media making has become digital and social media has been increasingly used as a tool for student activism, there are additional layers of complexity to building public awareness and memory of students’ advocacy for social change. Without having access to information about what came before, students are unaware of the strategies that prior student activists used, including what worked and what was less effective. Without this cultural memory, student activists and organizers work to build movements in conditions that often lead to burnout. After talking to current and former student activists and organizers, we found that they experience administrative exploitation of their burnout. In addition to the big turnover in students every year, this slows down, delays, and even prevents the movements and, ultimately, change that student activists and organizers work hard to promote.
The lack of historical knowledge about feminist student movement activism is one reason why we have been building the Feminist Student News and Protest (SNAP) archive, a digital archive of student activism around gendered and sexual violence and other issues related to equity and social justice on McGill’s campus. The Feminist SNAP Archive includes student press articles, policy documents, open letters, documents from student organizations, and ephemera from protests and other events, providing a much-needed history lesson in McGill student activism.
The Feminist SNAP Archive
Many of the materials in the Feminist SNAP Archive are quite historically significant. For example, the archive includes the Birth Control Handbook, a text published by the Students' Society of McGill University in 1968 that violated Canadian anti-obscenity law to provide information on birth control, sexual education, and reproductive justice. The archive also contains a copy of the 1986 university policy, “Regulations Concerning Complaints of Sexual Harassment,” which was the university’s first policy on sexual harassment and provided the basis for subsequent policies related to discrimination and sexual violence. Documents like this one are not available on McGill University’s website.
We are also working on adding historical timelines to the website, including one focused on policy development and another focused on different types of student activism. These timelines will exhibit historical artifacts related to each major event, including materials that document student organizing as well as the responses of the university administration. Our preliminary work on this has underscored the cyclical nature of student activism. We found that periods of student outrage are often responding to an incident of campus sexual violence that was (or at least appeared to be) brushed aside by the administration. These events—and student reporting on them—often incite students to denounce the administration, share information, develop measures to support survivors of sexual violence, and/or draft a sexual violence policy, as was the case for a group of McGill students in 2014. Administration responses to student activism also repeat. For example, in 1991, as reported in the student press, some members of the administration were dismissive of students demands for a sexual violence policy, claiming that there was no need for such measures, which echoes what administrators initially told students in 2013 and early 2014.
Most importantly, the Feminist SNAP Archive is dedicated to centering student voices. For us, the stories that most need to be known, especially at this moment of intense student activism around issues like COVID-19 precautions, racial justice, and climate change, are the ones that have not yet been heard or remembered. Our commitment to accurately representing the work of student activists, the student press, and student organizations foregrounds an ethics of collaboration we share with students. For example, we have interviewed student activists to learn how they would like their stories told, and we have worked with them to begin digitizing their materials both for our archive and for their own institutional memory projects. This collaboration ensures both that the Feminist SNAP archive will be a useful resource to student activists and that the archive properly recognizes—and gives credit to—the historical significance of student mobilization on campus and its continued impact today.
To learn more about the Feminist SNAP Archive, visit our About page. You can also write to us through the website’s contact form. We welcome comments, feedback, and suggestions about materials that could add to the archive’s collections.
Benji Nothwehr (they/them) is a research assistant with iMPACTS, leading the creation of the Feminist Student News and Protest (SNAP) Archive. As a researcher and archivist, they are interested in documenting and archiving activist movements and marginalized histories in ways that are easy to access and use and serve the communities from which they came.
