GROW is a collaboration of students, faculty, staff, and librarians at UC San Diego working to document the untold stories – going back to the 1980s and prior – behind the creation of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Studies Program at UC San Diego. Established in the Fall of 2020, AAPI Studies is the result of many years of organizing, led by students and faculty who understood the demand for an Asian American Studies minor as one part of a broader demand for social transformation in the university and beyond. The institutionalization of AAPI Studies, though an important milestone, risks erasing this longer history and radical vision. Thus began Project GROW.
GROW started in Winter 2021 with one primary aim: to document and preserve the history of AAPI student activism at UC San Diego. With guidance from librarians, students learned to do oral history interviews and to conduct research at the university archives. Our overall aim is to create a digital archive that amplifies the stories of students, faculty, alumni, and staff, all of whom, in ways big and small, played a role in transforming the university to better serve the needs of AAPI communities. Our efforts align with, and contribute to, other existing projects, including Tell Us How UC It: A Living Archive for Student Activism at UC San Diego, and UCSD Student History: An (Incomplete) Archive of Student Activism at UCSD.
The process of archiving is not an individual act but rather a collective effort. Therefore, a second objective of GROW is to bring together a community of students, staff, and faculty, who come to this project with varying interests and skills yet who all share a commitment to collective learning, about the ways that our relationships to the university intertwine. GROW models a kind of multi-directional learning about our shared pasts that empowers us to create change.
