April 8 & 22 | IDES Brown Bag Series

Title: Preserving Breonna Taylor’s Name: The Black Lives Matter Memorial Fence Artifact Collection and Protest Memory in Digital Archives

Author: Alisa Hardy

Abstract:
This presentation examines how digital archives shape the protest memory of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the aftermath of racialized police violence. Focusing on the Black Lives Matter Memorial Fence Artifact Collection (BLMMFAC), created to preserve materials left at the fence surrounding Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., between June 2020 and January 2021, I analyze how protest symbolism and archival systems structure the preservation of Breonna Taylor’s name within emerging cultural memory. Taylor was a Black woman killed by police during the execution of a no-knock warrant in Louisville, Kentucky, in March of 2020, and she became a widely recognized figure within the movement, representing Black women’s vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence. Her name and image circulated through protest spaces in Washington, D.C., where they functioned as symbols of collective mourning and political resistance. I interrogate protest memory as a form of social learning about past practices of Black resistance to understand how informal and formal knowledge of dissent is built and transmitted over time. Through rhetorical analysis and an adaptation of Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, I examine how visual imagery and material form in protest photos associated with Taylor signal embodied participation and how aggregation situates her memory within broader patterns of racial violence. When these materials are digitized through preservation, classification, and descriptive metadata practices, these acts of dissent are converted into durable institutional record. The digital archive thus becomes a tensioned memory infrastructure that stabilizes protest memory for public access while simultaneously reorganizing these materials in ways that constrain their relational and future-oriented claims for social justice. By examining how protest materials are administered within digital repositories, this research highlights the role of archives as co-creators and managers of protest memory within social movements. More broadly, it raises questions about how cultural institutions shape the transmission of Black resistance, how protest knowledge is formalized within digital archival systems, and how movements resisting racialized state violence remember and reconfigure Black women’s histories over time.

Title: You Might Break My Soul? Job Dissatisfaction Among Social Science Faculty

Author: Mackenzie Alston
Co-Author: Sarah Jacobson

Abstract:
Workers who have previously matched with a job may seek alternative employment if they become dissatisfied with their experience. Such dissatisfaction can result from exogenous shocks that alter constraints, work-related preferences, or perceptions of work or employer. This study empirically examines whether an exogenous shock leads to job dissatisfaction and job seeking, and whether these effects differ by gender, using a survey of social science faculty conducted 1.75 years after the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns. The pandemic altered workers’ constraints by increasing the opportunity cost of time through heightened care work demands at home, changing perceptions of jobs and employers as individuals responded to health-related workplace policies, and may have shifted preferences in ways that affect both productivity and the intrinsic utility derived from work. Approximately half of respondents reported considering leaving their jobs at some point. However, constraints in the academic job market and other factors limited the number of actual departures. Analysis of gender differences in job satisfaction and job search decisions indicates that women were more dissatisfied and more likely to abandon the job search process. Furthermore, women seeking to leave their positions were more likely than men to consider leaving academia entirely. These findings suggest that exogenous shocks, such as COVID-19, may negatively impact workplace gender equity by reducing women’s satisfaction and potentially increasing disparities through differential attrition.