Written By Paula Mock

Arriving at the Connecticut State Library (CSL) archival warehouse was incredibly exciting for me (I’m sure if you’d told me a few years ago I’d be excited about archival documents, I’d laugh!). Meeting our MTS team that I’d only met on Zoom so far was strangely cathartic–even though we’d only met a couple of times, I felt (and still feel!) that this is a team made up of particularly kind and diligent people. The lingering anxieties that I had about failing to do the project justice were eased, especially as we entered the library and sat down in front of the boxes.

The daunting task of unearthing and methodically going through each of the thick bins of folders was one that I was fairly well-prepared for. During high school, I’d spent many of my afternoons and weekends at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, creating digestible science content for all age ranges. I’d had some practice with research and curation/selection of documents, especially when it comes to parsing out the most important and crucial information to bring out and amplify to a wider audience. These collection and research skills came in very handy in the CSL as we worked in pairs to make our way through as many boxes as we could. The experience of individually reading documents and then coming together to share particularly striking pieces was one that allowed conversation to spark at any point during the day–numerous times, we found ourselves having had  long, rich discussions about much larger-scale issues than just MTS itself.

One afternoon, I remember taking what we expected to be a “quick snack break,” all of us moving to a table away from the archival boxes and sitting around, musing over what we’d just seen. One of us (it’s hard to recall who, since we all took turns sharing out!) started the conversation with disbelief about a document they’d just looked over, and we collectively tried to wrap our heads around the implications of what we’d read and heard. Orange juice had been found to be laced with dangerous contaminants, and milk delivered from UConn’s dairy farm already spoiled and warm, and when faced with this information, UConn’s response had been to refrigerate the milk and juice cartons again, and present them later to MTS as if new.

This document and incident spurred an extensive group discussion about everything from food safety, to infantilizing members of our society who have different abilities, to  institutional responsibilities and justice–we must’ve talked for about an hour, but it felt as quick as fifteen minutes to me; I felt so immersed in what others were sharing, and it seemed like the rest of the team felt the same way. There was much jumping around from topic to topic–when one person made an observation, it jarred another person’s memory of another related experience, and then others would jump in as well. 

The energetic nature of the conversation was something that I’ve only been a part of in a few other academic settings, and it reminded me of a concept introduced to me in a sociology class at UConn last year: the “flow state,” one of complete focus that is only possible when fully immersed and concentrated on the current task. For a group of seven, I think it’s pretty remarkable that, from what I could tell, all of us in the room that day were so engaged in each other’s thoughts (and the material at hand) that we were able to completely “plug in” to the more-than-challenging conversation and feed off of each other’s ideas.