This brief report and reflection should be opened with thanks to all the donors and collaborators of the project. Congratulations for helping to build this research in Madrid where there were serious shortcomings on studies that address the figure of the university student and their circumstances. Because that's what this project is about. Not to isolate the figure of the student in order to study him out of his context, but to conceive him as such: him and his circumstance on local campuses.

One of our first turning points in the entire project came with a first disappointment that we experienced when we did not achieve the results that we set out to do. We invested many hours in an ambitious communication plan to appeal to citizens that did not result in the expected participation. We were able to broadcast compelling videos and interviews on national and local radio and television during prime time.  A really complicated action for an academic project in Spain. We managed to launch communications in institutions, universities and schools. We placed our messages on well-known websites and blogs within the academic field, but the results obtained were marginal. It is true that the situation did not accompany us. We were in the middle of a wave of Covid19 and we understood that citizens had other priorities. Many of us are professors and we had to change from the face-to-face modality to the online format to teach classes. The students were not interested in the projects in general. Their heads were absent, as was society. This fact, not having reached our objectives of citizen participation implied a change of strategy in our research. We concentrated all our efforts on calling students, friends, and family on the one hand, and on the other, we scrutinised all possible bibliographic sources from online repositories and from local and national libraries. In this way, we open two sections: the network of interconnected student, teacher and family connections, together with the investigation of catalogues and repositories.

We were surprised by the quality of many of the images that we received and found through each source. From the face-to-face libraries we discovered two large series of photographs on paper in the CIU photographic collection (Marqués de Valdecilla Historical Library) from the 40-50 and 60-70 decades with a great definition that document the day-to-day life of students at the university and the university itself. A large number of images of female students in canteens or in class during the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the description of the enrolment process of students in the 1960s and 1970s, but also the visualisation of the personnel in charge of such labours. Similarly, we highlight various images of students studying in libraries or working in language laboratories.

In the digital catalogue of the Archives of the Community of Madrid we found a large amount of material that we divided into two large blocks for this investigation. On the one hand, the donations of citizens who have been proactively sending their photographs on paper to this local institution that offers an open service on all kinds of topics, and on the other, the photographic collection of Martín Santos Yubero, who has been one of the great Spanish photographers and documentarists. His work included in this archive is really extensive and we have chosen some of his most representative images from the 40s, 50s and 60s, and among them we would highlight his series of photographs of the celebration of the local Olympics on campus, visits to the Franco's government university, the life of female students in student residences, model airplane practices in the aeronautical engineering faculty or the day-to-day portraits of students at universities.

 

And lastly, within the Archive of the Community of Madrid we highlight the citizen contributions, who spontaneously and proactively donated their creations to shape this large digital database. We have selected several photos of citizens who donated their exhibition rights to this archive. The complication of this selection is that we had to contact each one to request permission for its use. The institution very generously provided us with their contacts, but many of them were dead ends so we did not have access to them. Thus, we have only been able to gain the consent of a select few who represent unique scenes especially in the decade of the 80s.

The rest of the images have been obtained by creating lines of contact with relatives, teachers and students. Most of them, except for those provided by ÁngelesAfuera and Joaquín Turina, —who provide more information on the 70s and 80s—, fill in the end of the 20th century and comply with the first two decades of the 21st century. In this aspect, we highlight the leisure scenes represented outside the classrooms on campus where you can appreciate the intense student life and the importance of social relationships in these years.

In conclusion, we can affirm that the documents found and selected for our research show a wide variety of situations, characters and spaces on university campuses from 1945 to now. All in all, this work brings together and accumulates a large number of details that could provide the necessary incentive to start new studies with these data. Among all the above, we highlight the presence of female students that is sometimes not so easy to visualise in early decades in Spanish universities in the media. As has been observed in this work, the images are abundant.

 

Antonio Díaz Lucena