Imagining transformative spaces: the personal-political sites of community archives (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation
Archives and Records
Through data gleaned from semi-structured interviews with 17 community archives founders, volunteers and staff at 12 sites in Southern California, this paper develops a new tripartite framework for understanding the ontological, epistemological and social impact of community archives. Throughout, it reflects the ways in which communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender and political position experience both the profoundly negative affective consequences of absence and misrepresentation in mainstream media and archives (which it calls ‘symbolic annihilation’) and the positive effect of complex and autonomous forms of representation in community-driven archives (which it terms ‘representational belonging’).
Archives and Manuscripts, 2017
Community archives have compelled shifts in dominant archival management practices to reflect community agency and values. To analyse these shifts, we ask: In what ways do community archives and their staff challenge traditional archival modes of practice? Do community archives work within or against dominant frameworks for institutional sustainability? Do community archives challenge or replicate dominant custody practices? Based on semi-structured interviews with 17 founders, staff and volunteers at 12 Southern California community archives, this research examines the diverse models of practice utilised by community archives practitioners that diverge from and challenge standard practices in the field. By addressing these questions, our research uncovers a variety of models of practice employed by communities in Southern California to autonomously create and sustain their archives.
Returning to Place: digital collections and community-based archives
By examining the use of digitised collections within community-based archives this article highlights the new, active roles collection items are playing within cultural practice. Freed from the restrictions of institutional control, collection items are open to new modes of community participation and collaboration. The characteristics of these archives, locally controlled and structured around restricted access, challenges assumed notions of reciprocity inherent in digital networks and community collaboration projects. This article uses community-based archives to speculate that the future of digitised collections is one of proliferation, and that inclusion of the complex meanings and associations attached to re-contextualised digital copies presents a number of challenges to future archival practice.
Archives, Record-keeping and Social Justice, 2020
This chapter explores the impact archives have in social justice struggles over urban redevelopments, looking at uses of activist archives in an anti-gentrification campaign. Because urban redevelopment takes place over a long period of time (sometimes decades) and because it is an increasingly bureaucratic and mediated process, archives can aid activists in contesting gentrification. Drawing from a case study of the 56a Infoshop Archive and the redevelopment of the Heygate Council Estate in London, UK, this chapter illuminates two ways in which archives have been incorporated into anti-gentrification activism. First, archiving is used as a means to track the redevelopment process, enabling scrutiny of local authorities and developers. Secondly, archival records are used to construct and disseminate alternative narratives in public spheres that counter official discourses of regeneration. Learning from the case study, I suggest that the social justice impact of archives for activists is the ability to mobilize alternative and counter-knowledges, strengthen collective voices in official spaces of politics, and preserve and publicize histories of resistance against inequalities in the city.
Community-Driven Archives: Conocimiento, Healing, and Justice
Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 2021
According to the Arizona Archives Matrix, the Latinx, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community currently make up over 42% of Arizona's population but are only represented in 0-2% of known archival collections. Arizona's archives are dominated by white narratives that promote white supremacy, settler colonialism, and dehumanizes Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) living on this land for centuries. This article will share parts of my autoethnography as a Queer Latinx and archivist who is addressing this inequity and erasure by establishing the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) Initiative at Arizona State University with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Since the project's inception, I embraced a love ethic that uses Gloria Anzaldúa's path to conocimiento as an epistemological framework for our CDA work. In their book This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating reflect on how conocimiento, a Spanish word for consciousness and knowledge, can be used to decolonize the mind, body, and soul of marginalized communities. I believe BIPOC and Queer community archivists experience the seven stages of conocimiento as they learn how to preserve their archives, reclaim their narratives, and build a collective memory that heals historical trauma. The undeniable truth is that decolonizing is an act of deep transformative love, courage, and reflection. A predominantly white profession will never decolonize archives because the foundation of most traditional repositories is rooted in white power and systemic racism. In order to truly liberate archives from oppressive theory and practice, there needs to be a redistribution of power and resources which grants marginalized people the authority to lead community-driven archives.
Activist participatory communities in archival contexts: theoretical perspectives
Participatory Archives, 2019
We start this chapter by acknowledging that the label ‘activist participatory communities’ is a construct that is rooted in what we will describe as the ‘institutional gaze’. Our use of this construct as a means to define and understand ‘different’ forms of archiving is therefore complex and can have positive and negative consequences. In our archival context, which is the place from which both authors speak, the label can be used constructively by archive professionals as a means of acknowledging, seeking to understand, embrace and support archival activities and spaces that occur outside traditional archive structures. However, all processes of defining that position something or someone against an implicitly accepted ‘norm’ can be problematic. The fixing of the institutionally rooted (and therefore mainstream) archival gaze on the ‘other’ carries the risk of reinforcing distance, a continual forcing and holding at the margins, as opposed to an embedding into the heart of archival...
Archives as Spaces of Radical Hospitality
Australian Feminist Studies, 2021
Deploying feminist notions of embodied, relational archival practices, this article critically defines and creatively unites both ‘radical’ and ‘hospitality’ as a tool for enacting generosity in archives. Drawing on the complexities of Derrida’s Of Hospitality (Cultural Memory in the Present) alongside feminist scholarship and, what Cherríe Moraga calls ‘theories of the flesh,’ the author elucidates the urgent work of imagining archives as spaces of radical hospitality. The article uses embodied knowledges and storytelling as archival methodology to propose a set of elements of radical hospitality and what it means and does in and for the community archives. The author will attend to the creative possibilities that acknowledging the relational complexities of the archives, its collections, and its records as integral to establishing socially just and generative spaces for its records creators and its visitors. Radical hospitality becomes not only a possibility but also the lively, animated, and joyous archival body and all of its parts.
“To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives1
The American Archivist, 2016
Although there has been much work published that assumes that independent community archives have an important impact on communities, little research has been done to empirically assess this impact. This research paper begins to fill in this gap by reporting on the results of a series of qualitative interviews with academic members of one ethnic community regarding their responses to one community archives. More specifically, this study reports on interviews conducted with South Asian American educators regarding their responses to the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), an independent nonprofit community-based organization that operates the websites www.saadigitalarchive.org. and www.firstdaysproject.org. The study reports on several emergent themes: the absence of or difficulty in accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA; the affective and ontological impact of discovering SAADA for the first time; the affective impact of SAADA on respondents' South Asian American students; and SAADA's ability to promote feelings of inclusion both within the South Asian American ethnic community and in the larger society. Together, these 1 The authors would like to thank Anne Gilliland, Ricardo Punzalan, and Gregory Leazer for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and all of the respondents for their participation. 1 responses suggest the ways in which one community archives counters the symbolic annihilation of the community it serves, and instead produces feelings of what we term "representational belonging." The paper concludes by exploring the epistemological, ontological, and social levels of representational belonging.
Introduction: Developing the Archive: Public Space and the Urban Library in Contemporary Perspective
The Urban Library, 2020
This book will examine the changing roles and meaning of public libraries and library design responding to cultural and social values within the context of the creative city, branding, iconic architecture, and as an anchor institution. The global trend of the creative city urban development model and branding is anchored in the cultural institution of the library among other cultural institutions to attract the global professional class of creatives, tourists, and investors. Contemporary urban public libraries are also representative of democratic values to offer universal access. They seriously adopt as part of their mission the provision of important programming that highlights the interests of their constituents engaging in the processes of community building and establishing a strong connection based on tolerance and inclusivity to the cities in which they are located. The book is composed of an analysis of the creative city model, branding, and the library as an anchor institution to attract skilled knowledge labor to the city as well as tourists, residents, and investors. The public library design as a cultural institution for the commons that belongs to all will be a chapter that focuses on the meaning of the library, its relationship to the city, and other important components from the perspective of library staff and designers based on interviews and visits to some of the libraries selected. Descriptions of the public library main branches in Salt Lake City,