Hello World!

     Hello, my name is Rachel Baldwin and I am a fourth year Anthropology/Sociology and Museum Studies double major. I'm interested in history, science, and technology museums and how they engage visitors. It's interesting how they handle visitors of different ages, ethnicities, and abilities. I'm also interested in socioeconomic inequality and immigration in the US. I've also held and interest in LGBTQ+ studies and gender studies. Outside of my majors, I love to do martial arts, watch cartoons and shows, and paint on occasion. 
     I'm still very new to the Museum Studies field, but I've had a little experience to help me. This past summer, I had an internship with the Genesee Country Village and Museum (GCV&M). I worked in collections cataloging new acquisitions, inventorying the collection, taking photographs of objects, helping to create a public digital database, moving objects, and doing minor cleaning and polishing of objects. I also had the opportunity to write a small essay about an object of my choosing, a police lantern, that was posted to a social media blog. I was lucky to have interned there and I learned so much about working in a museum, the GCV&M helped me so much! I've also taken a class called the Legal and Ethical Issues of Collecting which taught me many of the skills I used in my internship and helped me contextualize the work I did. Below is an image of the Wehle Galley at GCV&M.

Mi Historia so far

For my senior thesis I am focusing on an online oral history exhibit. This exhibit will focus on young, adults of Latin descent in Rochester, specifically on their immigration stories. I hope that by allowing the narrative to be held by those whose stories these are that we can shift the power narrative. Often times when we hear about immigrants in our political climate it is nothing but negative and often false ideas of what it means to be an immigrant. I also hope that this project will help educate people and maybe open their eyes a little bit more. The reason I am focusing on young adults ages 18-25 is because we hold the future in our hands. Everything that is happening in the US right now, all of the legislation and rhetoric, is going to directly affect this specific group of people for the foreseeable future, so their stories should be told loudly and proudly. Although I am focusing on young adults in Rochester at the moment, I hope to expand this project later on to include a wide variety of people from all over the country. This story is an important one to tell, especially for me as an immigrant myself.

My thesis project

Immigration is currently one of the most hotly debated issues in our current political climate. With the recent news about DACA and Trump's comments on Latin Americans, Mexicans in particular. I find that no time is better than now to do a project centered around Latino immigrants. My senior thesis idea is to make a website with a collection of immigration stories straight from the mouths of immigrants. I will most likely be narrowing this idea down even further to have the stories of immigrants in the Rochester area. 

This topic is incredibly important to me as an immigrant and the daughter of an immigrant. So often people are detached from this issue and look at it as something that is black and white. I think that by handing the power back to the people whose story this is and giving them the chance to tell it, we can lessen the vilification that has been happening to the Latino community. Being bilingual will also help me gather these stories because I would like to make the interviewees as comfortable as possible in sharing something so intimate with me. I am hoping to provide transcriptions of these interviews as well as audio recordings to make the information as accessible as possible. I am incredibly excited to begin this project and cannot wait until I can put some leg work behind it.