Last spring, members of the Class of 2024 were invited to participate in a project that aimed to extend their connection to the college even after graduation. Their submissions of memorable and personal items to a capsule were part of the initial iteration of what would become the “Inclusion Beyond Graduation” project, which officially began in Fall 2024.
Augustella Makiese ’25, an Inclusive Excellence Fellows Initiative (IEFI) Fellow and a driving force behind the project, is working to create stronger connections between a student’s time at Swarthmore and life as an alum by researching and collecting physical and digital artifacts that represent the college experience. She is supported by her IEFI advisor, Associate Director of Alumni and Family Communities Dee Butler-Simms, who is able to facilitate outreach through school wide communication channels. The Class Capsule itself is developed by the Office of Alumni and Family Programs and the College Archives, but Makiese’s IEFI project expands the scope by reaching out to more students and affinity groups for their contributions.
In an email to The Phoenix, Makiese elaborated on the goals of the project, stating she would like “to ensure that the story of each graduating class reflects the full breadth of its members’ experiences and the cultural context of the time.” The project emphasizes the inclusion of diverse voices, in line with IEFI’s broader objective “to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at Swarthmore College and beyond.” This made IEFI an ideal avenue for channeling Makiese’s ambitions, who found that the diverse organizations where students would typically find a sense of belonging were diminished or gone in the wake of the COVID pandemic, creating an absence of opportunity to build a “community legacy.” The capsule project is one way to establish a tradition of always memorializing student voices, “particularly for [those] from historically underrepresented backgrounds.”
As mentioned in emails sent from the Office of Alumni and Family Programs to each class year, the project will gather all varieties of digital submissions such as art, playlists, memes, photographs, and written work until the class’s senior year, when submission eligibility will expand to include 2D and 3D objects. Limiting students to digital submissions for their first three years at the college will ideally minimize logistical complications that could arise from submitting and storing physical items, and generally “[allow] students to contribute organically.”
Physical items are to be stored in climate-safe boxes under the supervision of the College Archives and Office of Alumni and Family Programs, and the project is planning to make digital submissions accessible from a secure Swarthmore server for class reunions that happen every five years for each class. On the IEFI website, the project also outlines the role of the Class Historian, who would be part of the cohort of Senior Class Officers and help curate their peers’ submissions.
Makiese added that items with “themes that speak to students’ sense of belonging, change-making efforts, and reflections on what it means to be part of Swarthmore’s evolving story” are especially encouraged for submission. This messaging will be reinforced at future events around campus that relate to “institutional memory and cultural preservation” as a way to raise awareness about the project and facilitate engagement in the process of documenting and archiving students’ memories. Visibility of the project around campus is especially important in its first year, but “Inclusion Beyond Graduation” is envisioned to become an official tradition alongside other commencement-related traditions such as the Last Collection and climbing Clothier Tower. “Ideally, each capsule would be revisited at class reunions … providing a meaningful point of reconnection and community growth,” Makiese wrote.
Although the Class of 1994 created a class time capsule at their 25th reunion in 2019 to be opened at their 50th reunion (2044), it is not part of the Office of Alumni and Makiese’s project. It does, however, draw inspiration from it and “similar archival practices such as the Halcyon and the BCC Time Capsule.” “Inclusion Beyond Graduation” is set to be the most comprehensive of these projects, with its campus-wide focus and inclusion of both tangible and digital materials.
As Makiese was researching for her IEFI project, she discovered that the archive content for affinity groups was strikingly small. She hopes that “Inclusion Beyond Graduation” will help remedy the problem and create “a living archive” that “centers inclusion, joy, resistance, and community across classes,” providing a window into student life at the college for future generations.
