Archives, Recordkeeping and Social Justice


Book Description

Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice expands the burgeoning literature on archival social justice and impact. Illuminating how diverse factors shape the relationship between archives, recordkeeping systems, and recordkeepers, this book depicts struggles for different social justice objectives. Discussions and debates about social justice are playing out across many disciplines, fields of practice, societal sectors, and governments, and yet one dimension cross-cutting these actors and engagement spaces has remained unexplored: the role of recordkeeping and archiving. To clarify and elaborate this connection, this volume provides a rigorous account of the engagement of archives and records—and their keepers—in struggles for social justice. Drawing upon multidisciplinary praxis and scholarship, contributors to the volume examine social justice from historical and contemporary perspectives and promote impact methodologies that align with culturally responsive, democratic, Indigenous, and transformative assessment. Underscoring the multiplicity of transformative social justice impacts influenced by recordmaking, recordkeeping, and archiving, the book presents nine case studies from around the world that link the past to the present and offer pathways towards a more just future. Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice will be an essential reading for researchers and students engaged in the study of archives, truth and reconciliation processes, social justice, and human rights. It should also be of great interest to archivists, records managers, and information professionals.




Archives and Justice


Book Description




Urgent Archives


Book Description

Urgent Archives argues that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal archival solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description. Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, this book uncovers how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design, while looking toward the the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Based on more than a decade of ethnography at community archives sites including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the book explores how members of minoritized communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression. Caswell explores the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present. Urgent Archives extends the theoretical range of critical archival studies and provides a new framework for archivists looking to transform their practices. The book should also be of interest to scholars of archival studies, museum studies, public history, memory studies, gender and ethnic studies and digital humanities.




Archival Silences


Book Description

Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign ‘silence’ is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections. Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the ‘other’, this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences. Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.




Archives and Human Rights


Book Description

Why and how can records serve as evidence of human rights violations, in particular crimes against humanity, and help the fight against impunity? Archives and Human Rights shows the close relationship between archives and human rights and discusses the emergence, at the international level, of the principles of the right to truth, justice and reparation. Through a historical overview and topical case studies from different regions of the world the book discusses how records can concretely support these principles. The current examples also demonstrate how the perception of the role of the archivist has undergone a metamorphosis in recent decades, towards the idea that archivists can and must play an active role in defending basic human rights, first and foremost by enabling access to documentation on human rights violations. Confronting painful memories of the past is a way to make the ghosts disappear and begin building a brighter, more serene future. The establishment of international justice mechanisms and the creation of truth commissions are important elements of this process. The healing begins with the acknowledgment that painful chapters are essential parts of history; archives then play a crucial role by providing evidence. This book is both a tool and an inspiration to use archives in defence of human rights. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/ISBN, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.




Community Archives, Community Spaces


Book Description

This book traces the trajectory of the community archives movement, expanding the definition of community archives to include sites such as historical societies, social movement organisations and community centres. It also explores new definitions of what community archives might encompass, particularly in relation to disciplines outside the archives. Over ten years have passed since the first volume of Community Archives, and inspired by continued research as well as by the formal recognition of community archives in the UK, the community archives movement has become an important area of research, recognition and appreciation by archivists, archival scholars and others worldwide. Increasingly the subject of papers and conferences, community archives are now seen as being in the vanguard of social concerns, markers of community-based activism, a participatory approach exemplifying the on-going evolution of ‘professional’ archival (and heritage) practice and integral to the ability of people to articulate and assert their identity. Community Archives, Community Spaces reflects the latest research and includes practical case studies on the challenges of building and sustaining community archives. This new book will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and academics in the archives and records community as well as to historians and other scholars concerned with community building and social issues.




Archives Power


Book Description

Archives Power argues to answer some of the complex social, political, professional, and ethical questions that are at the heart of the roles and identity of the archive professional, their significance in modern society, and their impact on human history and culture.




Producing the Archival Body


Book Description

Producing the Archival Body draws on theoretical and practical research conducted within US and Canadian archives, along with critical and cultural theory, to examine the everyday lived experiences of archivists and records creators that are often overlooked during archival and media production. Expanding on the author’s previous work, which engaged archival and queer theories to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology that intervenes in traditional archival practices, the book invites readers interested in humanistic inquiry to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, the author introduces new understandings of archival bodies. Contributing to recent disciplinary moves that offer a more transdisciplinary emphasis, Lee interrogates how power circulates and is deployed in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities. Producing the Archival Body will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of archival studies, library and information science, gender and women’s studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities, and media studies. It should also be of great interest to practitioners working in and with archives




Archiving the Unspeakable


Book Description

Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering. Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars




Archives


Book Description

Archives: Recordkeeping in Society introduces the significance of archives and the results of local and international research in archival science. It explores the role of recordkeeping in various cultural, organisational and historical contexts. Its themes include archives as a web of recorded information: new information technologies have presented dilemmas, but also potentialities for managing of the interconnectedness of archives. Another theme is the relationship between evidence and memory in archives and in archival discourse. It also explores recordkeeping and accountability, memory, societal power and juridical power, along with an examination of issues raised by globalisation and interntionalisation.The chapter authors are researchers, practitioners and educators from leading Australian and international recordkeeping organisations, each contributing previously unpublished research in and reflections on their field of expertise. They include Adrian Cunningham, Don Schauder, Hans Hofman, Chris Hurley, Livia Iacovino, Eric Ketelaar and Ann Pederson.The book reflects broad Australian and international perspectives making it relevant worldwide. It will be a particularly valuable resource for students of archives and records, researchers from realted knowledge disciplines, sociology and history, practitioners wanting to reflect further on their work, and all those with an interest in archives and their role in shaping human activity and community culture.