Papers by Gracen Brilmyer
Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 2024
This article provides background on community archiving as it relates to a group of faculty membe... more This article provides background on community archiving as it relates to a group of faculty members currently working together to address the challenge of reimagining archival education to center non-dominant archival traditions and the restructuring of internship programs to provide financial compensation, by asking how MLIS programs might transform to better serve both minoritized communities and minoritized students. We focus on MLIS Education and Dominant Archival Theories and Practices, to explore the challenges of and possibilities for a large-scale North American effort to support paid internships at community archives.
First Monday, 2023
Centering disabled voices and leveraging disability studies as methodology within the constructio... more Centering disabled voices and leveraging disability studies as methodology within the construction of information systems can sharpen analyses of the design of information systems, algorithmic decision making, and their impacts. In this article, we put forth three main points: (1) thinking at the intersection of information and disability studies is productive and sharpens analyses about technology, bodyminds, and identity; (2) disabled people render themselves legible or illegible in information systems by creatively adapting to or resisting them; and (3) analyses of crip legibility are crucial to re-imagining the future of information systems. Together, these facets illustrate a move we call crip legibility: how disabled people flexibly respond to, contort, or collectively organize themselves to fit within (or be understood by) existing information systems while building new systems of resistance and care. This term considers the processes by which disabled bodyminds are disciplined, surveilled, or otherwise required to conform to standards set by existing ableist systems while holding space to reimagine otherwise. Information systems — like library call numbers that classify, document, and inform — might distill someone’s experience or identity into a format that becomes readable for medical diagnosis, hiring, legal compliance, and is reproduced in other settings or systems. Using case studies from this special issue, we show how prevalent and harmful these systems can be, how disabled people have resisted or worked around them, and how we might imagine or build otherwise. Crip legibility, then, draws attention to both histories and contemporary embodiments of surveillance and classification — of both disabled and non-disabled bodies — and commits to reimagining information systems that resist technoableist norms.
Archivaria, 2022
Using semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users and building on the emerging field ... more Using semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users and building on the emerging field of critical access studies, this article illustrates the ways in which archival spaces and their in/accessibility affectively impact disabled people. Interviewees describe how they experience barriers to accessibility not only at a basic, architectural level – of not being able to get into a building or archives room – but also through archives’ policies and expectations regarding the ways in which archival work is done. The way that accessibility is implemented, even beyond legal compliance, greatly impacts the extent to which disabled researchers feel they belong in archival spaces. Inaccessibility, this research shows, produces a sense of unbelonging; the deprioritization of disability both as a subject or organizing category and as an identity of a potential researcher, shows disabled people that they do not belong in archival spaces, and this is further complicated for multiply marginalized disabled people. By examining the multifaceted ways that disabled people experience inaccessibility, this article focuses on the “emotionally expensive” aspects of inaccessibility to emphasize the ways in which barriers compound and accumulate and can prevent disabled people from accessing our own histories. These findings demonstrate how central accessibility is to disabled people’s lives: it is almost impossible to talk about our experiences of archival materials and history without discussing how we navigate the multiple barriers to accessing them.
Archivaria
Using semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users and building on the emerging field ... more Using semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users and building on the emerging field of critical access studies, this article illustrates the ways in which archival spaces and their in/accessibility affectively impact disabled people. Interviewees describe how they experience barriers to accessibility not only at a basic, architectural level – of not being able to get into a building or archives room – but also through archives’ policies and expectations regarding the ways in which archival work is done. The way that accessibility is implemented, even beyond legal compliance, greatly impacts the extent to which disabled researchers feel they belong in archival spaces. Inaccessibility, this research shows, produces a sense of unbelonging; the deprioritization of disability both as a subject or organizing category and as an identity of a potential researcher, shows disabled people that they do not belong in archival spaces, and this is further complicated for multiply marg...
The American Archivist
This article contributes to ongoing discourse that highlights oppressive institutional attitudes ... more This article contributes to ongoing discourse that highlights oppressive institutional attitudes and approaches toward archiving materials that document the lived experiences of historically marginalized and minoritized people and communities. Through analyzing focus groups and interviews with members of minoritized communities about community archives, this article outlines four key tensions that exist around representation: holding conflicting desires of how to honor older generations; navigating methods of respecting privacy and cultural values; acknowledging the importance of preserving community history versus individual histories; and developing strategies for protecting the community. Together, these tensions illustrate the nuances of representation in archives: how members of minoritized communities navigate complex, often conflicting, affects within archival materials and how they protect themselves and future generations through visibility and invisibility. The authors int...
Archival Science
Using data collected through semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users, this articl... more Using data collected through semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users, this article foregrounds disabled people's relationships with time, specifically to pasts and representations thereof in archival material. It illustrates the ways in which disabled people use their knowledge of how disability is understood—in archives and in society—to anticipate their erasure in archival material. First, focusing on the past, this data illustrates the prevalence of disability stereotypes, tropes, and limited perspectives within the records that document disabled people. Second, in witnessing such representations (or lack thereof), disabled researchers described how they are affectively impacted in the present moment: witnessing the violence of the past is emotionally difficult for many disabled people researching their histories. Third, using past experiences of archival erasure, interviewees described coming to expect and anticipate future absences—anticipation as an affective mode helped them prepare to encounter forms of erasure, to protect themselves against possible harms, and to hope for something different, all of which reflects their experiences of how disability is understood in society. This data reflect the way anticipation is a central facet of crip time—the multiple ways that disabled people experience time, pace, and temporal moments—to show how disabled people feel through multiple temporal landscapes and approach historical and archival representation.
This critical archival studies dissertation examines the subtleties of disability in records by b... more This critical archival studies dissertation examines the subtleties of disability in records by broadly asking “how can we tell a history of disability with little to no forms of archival evidence?” I attempt to answer this question by interrogating the contents of historical documentation, the archival processes that influence their understanding as well as disabled people’s experiences in archives today. This project begins with the disabled community: through interviews with disabled scholars, artists, activists and community members, it first draws out the effects and affects of archival representation and archival spaces on the disabled community today. Then, in response to the disabled community’s need for more complex representation, it closely examines a history where disability has been obscured or erased: The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. To do this, historical records, processes, and documentation are closely analyzed in order to excavate narratives of disab...
Sustainable Digital Communities, 2020
Using data collected through semi-structured interviews, this paper outlines two ways disabled pe... more Using data collected through semi-structured interviews, this paper outlines two ways disabled people relate to their representation in archives. First, many participants reflected on the prevalence of disability stereotypes, tropes and limited perspectives within the records that document us. Witnessing these representations—or rather, misrepresentations—and their violent effects is emotionally difficult for many disabled people researching our histories. Second, many interviewees saw themselves in archival subjects and related to the threat of institutionalization they faced. Yet, as they see pieces of themselves in other times, disabilities and geographies, disabled researchers are also aware of the activation of present politics, vocabularies, and critical lenses that they apply when addressing the historical record. As part of a larger research project that investigates the impacts of archival representation, these findings lay the foundation for the multifaceted ways in which disabled communities are affected by witnessing themselves in history through digital and physical archives.
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2020
In the late 1980s, Professor of Immunology Ana Soto accidentally discovered the presence of synth... more In the late 1980s, Professor of Immunology Ana Soto accidentally discovered the presence of synthetic estrogens in her lab equipment. Her lab had designed an experiment to test the effect of estrogen on the proliferation of human breast cancer cells (MCF7). Based on previous findings, Soto and her research partner Carlos Sonnenschein believed that, contrary to popular wisdom, the introduction of estrogen would not directly induce the proliferation of the cells, but would instead interfere with a naturally occurring inhibitor in the blood. But the control setup containing positive and negative controls (used in the past without problem) was now producing odd readings: although no estrogenic compound had been introduced, the cancer cells were still proliferating. Soto and Sonnenschein methodically removed each item in the control setup that might be producing the estrogen-like result. When they discovered that the estrogenic activity leached from the plastic centrifuge tubes used to s...
Archival Science, 2018
This paper critically explores power structures embedded in archival description and re-conceptua... more This paper critically explores power structures embedded in archival description and re-conceptualizes archives and archival material as assemblages of politicized decisions specifically by utilizing Alison Kafer's political/relational model of disability as a framework. Kafer's model draws upon previous models of disability to open up contestation and politicization of disability as a category. This approach acknowledges that concepts of disability always already intersect with notions of race, class, age, gender, and sexuality. This article argues that crossinforming archival studies and feminist disability studies illuminates the long history that records creation and description processes have in documenting, surveilling, and controlling disabled and other non-normative bodies and minds. Furthermore, a political/relational approach makes possible the illumination of archival assemblages: the multiple perspectives, power structures, and cultural influences-all of which are temporally, spatially, and materially contingent-that inform the creation and archival handling of records. Through close readings of multiple records' descriptions, both inside and outside of disability, this paper focuses on the complexity of language and its politics within disability communities. A political/relational approach first promotes moving away from the replication and reliance on self-evident properties of a record and second advocates for addressing-not redressing-contestable terms, both of which illuminate the archival assemblages which produced it. By embracing the contestation of disability, and therefore the corresponding ways in which it is represented in archives, archivists and archives users are able to perceive and challenge the ways in which norms and deviance are understood, perpetuated, and constructed in public narratives via archives. Existing at the intersection of disability studies, feminist discourse, and archival studies, this paper builds theory around archival description and
Archival Science, 2018
Although much has been written about formal archival spaces, little scholarship has addressed the... more Although much has been written about formal archival spaces, little scholarship has addressed the physical spaces of community archives. This paper asks: How do community members imagine the physical spaces that steward identity-based community archives? Based on focus groups with more than 54 community archives users at five different community archives sites across Southern California, this paper examines how members of marginalized communities conceive of the physical space inhabited by community archives representing their communities. The sites explored range from a prominent location on a university campus, to storefronts, strip malls, and small cinderblock buildings. Yet across sites, users spoke about community archives spaces as symbolic and affectively moving locations. Many users described their community archives site as a ''home-away-from-home,'' marked by intergenerational dialog and a profound sense of belonging. For other users, community archives sites were described as ''politically generative spaces'' which foster dialog and debate about identity, representation, and activism and enable the community to envision its future. And yet, while the very existence of community archives is political, many participants felt that the full political potential of these sites is not yet realized. By listening to the voices of the communities represented and served by community archives, our research both indicates that a shift is warranted in archival metaphors of space and reveals how community archives are personally and politically transformative spaces for the communities they represent and serve.
DNA Barcodes, 2012
The genus Suphrodytes, is currently regarded as a monobasic Palearctic genus with one colour-vari... more The genus Suphrodytes, is currently regarded as a monobasic Palearctic genus with one colour-variable species, S. dorsalis. Here we show with >5 kbp of nuclear and mitochondrial genes and quantitative morphological characters that Suphrodytes consists of two well-defined species, albeit each with variable colour pattern. The primary barcode gene CO1, showed consistent signs of multiple copies, therefore a range of alternative housekeeping genes were screened for information. The two species were reciprocally monophyletic in genetrees from 12S, 16S, CO1, CO2, CytB, H3 and 18S. Explicit species delimitation tests based on the coalescent process model rejected the null hypothesis that the genealogies originated from a single panmictic species. The mitochondrial proteincoding genes were proportionally richest in information followed by 12S and Histone 3. Conservative nuclear 18S had a single fixed diagnostic character. The two species were significantly different in total bodylength, bodyshape, shape of the male aedeagus and parameres. We review the taxonomic literature of Suphrodytes and find S. dorsalis (Fabricius, 1787) and S. figuratus (Gyllenhal, 1826) to be the oldest available names for the respective species, and for which we designate lectotypes. Synonyms are established for both species which are broadly sympatric across the Palearctic and frequently even collected at the same locality.
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2019
For disabled people, 1 how we see ourselves in history matters. Since the Americans with Disabili... more For disabled people, 1 how we see ourselves in history matters. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, disability activism has often been remembered through highly visible public actions such as the Capitol Crawl and the Section 504 sit-ins. While these iconic moments-and the archives that document them-tell a crucial piece of our history, there are other narratives, often hidden or subtle in archives, that tell how our activism has historically worked under the surface or has been erased from popular cultural memory. Aimi Hamraie's Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability tells one such history: that of Universal Design, a flexible, inclusive design philosophy centered around accessibility for both disabled and nondisabled users. Universal Design, as it is understood today, is often framed simply and uncritically as "good" design for "everyone." However, Hamraie, through extensive archival research, locates less legible histories of disabled designers, activists, and architects who often get written out of the dominant narrative of the history of design and activism. Through this work, they complicate disability history, highlighting "the friction between liberal demands for compliance, productivity and assimilation and radical anti-assimilationist and crip methods of knowing-making the world"
Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 2021
This poster and accompanying postcards were created by Gracen Brilmyer for the Journal of Critica... more This poster and accompanying postcards were created by Gracen Brilmyer for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Science (JCLIS) special issue on Radical Empathy in Archival Practice. The poster and postcards visualize and embody the four archival relationships proposed by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor in their 2016 Archivaria article, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives,” in addition to three new relationships proposed by others. You are encouraged to complete this poster by: Filling in each of the 7 illustrated relationships (dotted line box) on postcards Mailing postcards to someone who embodies this relationship Appending the postcards to the poster, or writing in the relationships Additionally, since poster printing can be cost prohibitive, we have also included a "Printer-Friendly" version of the poster, which can easily be printed on multiple 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper and assembled. Pre-print first published o...
Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 2021
This poster and accompanying postcards were created by Gracen Brilmyer for the Journal of Critica... more This poster and accompanying postcards were created by Gracen Brilmyer for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Science (JCLIS) special issue on Radical Empathy in Archival Practice. The poster and postcards visualize and embody the four archival relationships proposed by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor in their 2016 Archivaria article, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives,” in addition to three new relationships proposed by others. You are encouraged to complete this poster by: Filling in each of the 7 illustrated relationships (dotted line box) on postcards Mailing postcards to someone who embodies this relationship Appending the postcards to the poster, or writing in the relationships Additionally, since poster printing can be cost prohibitive, we have also included a "Printer-Friendly" version of the poster, which can easily be printed on multiple 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper and assembled. Pre-print first published o...
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies:, 2022
Using the records that document the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as a case study, this artic... more Using the records that document the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as a case study, this article discusses the messiness and unknowability of provenance. Drawing attention to how the concept of provenance can emphasize the reconstruction of a fonds when records have been moved, rearranged, and dispersed, this article draws attention to the ‘curative’ and ‘rehabilitative’ orientations of established notions of provenance. Put in conversation with disability studies scholarship, which critiques rehabilitating, curing, and restoring, this article outlines the theoretical scaffolding of a crip provenance: a disability-centered framework of resisting the desire to restore and instead meets records where they are at. By acknowledging archival realities (where provenance is messy, partial, rumored, or nonexistent), this article emphasizes relationships that exist precisely because records are always already dispersed, duplicated, and partial. A crip provenance highlights four central facets of archival and crip relationships—people, systems, materials, and spaces—as a way to grapple with archival realities and tell disability history when there is little or no evidence of disabled people. Together these facets demonstrate how a crip provenance opens up multiple avenues for addressing disability in history: from highlighting moments of living disabled people experiencing archival material to expansive tangential histories that connect language and materials to politics and ableism within the colonial history of the Exposition.
Archival Science, 2021
Using data collected through semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users, this articl... more Using data collected through semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users, this article foregrounds disabled people's relationships with time, specifically to pasts and representations thereof in archival material. It illustrates the ways in which disabled people use their knowledge of how disability is understood—in archives and in society—to anticipate their erasure in archival material. First, focusing on the past, this data illustrates the prevalence of disability stereotypes, tropes, and limited perspectives within the records that document disabled people. Second, in witnessing such representations (or lack thereof), disabled researchers described how they are affectively impacted in the present moment: witnessing the violence of the past is emotionally difficult for many disabled people researching their histories. Third, using past experiences of archival erasure, interviewees described coming to expect and anticipate future absences—anticipation as an affective mode helped them prepare to encounter forms of erasure, to protect themselves against possible harms, and to hope for something different, all of which reflects their experiences of how disability is understood in society. This data reflect the way anticipation is a central facet of crip time—the multiple ways that disabled people experience time, pace, and temporal moments—to show how disabled people feel through multiple temporal landscapes and approach historical and archival representation.
Policy briefs, 2017
CSW Policy Brief 24 CREATING ACCESSIBLE CAMPUSES THROUGH FRAGRANCE-FREE POLICIES BY GRACEN BRILMY... more CSW Policy Brief 24 CREATING ACCESSIBLE CAMPUSES THROUGH FRAGRANCE-FREE POLICIES BY GRACEN BRILMYER AND ALEXANDRA APOLLONI The Center for the Study of Women’s Share the Air Campaign aims to raise awareness of the health effects of fragrances. Access to fragrance-free spaces is a disability jus- tice issue. While University campuses endeavor to provide accessible spaces for their students, in compliance with the Americans with Disabili- ties Act (ADA), few have policies in place that ensure accessibility for persons who experience sensitivity or adverse reactions to the synthetic fragrances and other hazardous substances found in widely used products. Cleaning products, personal care products, and other commonly-used products can trigger debilitating symptoms in those who experience conditions such as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance (TILT), allergy to fragrance, etc. Reactions can include migraines, respiratory issues, memory loss, seizures, et...
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Papers by Gracen Brilmyer