Radical Empathy in Archival Practice Poster and Postcards

2016

Much recent discussion about social justice in archival studies has assumed a legalistic, rights-based framework to delineate the role of records, archives, and archivists in both the violation of human rights and in holding individuals and governments accountable for basic human rights, such as the right to life, privacy, and freedom of expression. Yet decades of feminist scholarship have called into question the universality of a rights-based framework, arguing instead that an ethics of care is a more inclusive and apt model for envisioning and enacting a more just society. This article proposes a shift in the theoretical model used by archivists and archival studies scholars to address social justice concerns – from that based on individual rights to a model based on feminist ethics. In a feminist ethics approach, archivists are seen as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility. This article proposes four interrelated shifts in these archival relationships, based on radical empathy.

Archival Science, 2015

The archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society. But I will stick by what I have said about other scholars, and argue that the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake. If so, the rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not, as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft (Zinn 1977). This special issue of Archival Science ''Archiving Activism and Activist Archiving'' examines the intersections between contemporary archival practice and activism in different national, political, socioeconomic , technological, archival settings, and inspired by a variety of motivations and objectives. The practices examined in these articles go beyond advocacy for more active archival approaches and incorporate the spaces and endeavours where archivists seek to creatively document political and social movement activism as well as those projects which engage with archives and the archival process as part or in support of political, human right and social movement activism.

Archival Science

There is growing awareness in archival communities that working with records that contain evidence of human pain and suffering can result in unsettling emotions for archivists. One important finding of this work, however, is the considerable variability in not only the nature of responses, but also the nature of records that provoke emotional responses. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 archivists from across Canada and one from the United States, and employing grounded theory methodology, this study sought to better understand the nature of emotional responses and factors associated with distress. Archivists described a wide range of reactions including shock, intrusive thoughts, profound senses of anger, sadness and despair, and ultimately at times disrupted functioning in personal and occupational spheres. One factor that has been associated with increasing vulnerability to distress in other occupational groups is empathic engagement, which is understood to have two e...

American Archivist, 2022

Increasing interest in indigenization, decolonization, community archives, and the recent adoption of the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (PNAAM) by the Society of American Archivists, offer opportunities for archivists to reflect on the application of "reciprocity" in archives. This article examines reciprocity as a concept in the archival field and shows how current reciprocal practices in archives with Native and Indigenous holdings can inform the wider field and its practice. The authors chart the emergence of reciprocity as an archival responsibility and to create fieldwide change through meaningful, community-based partnerships. They posit a continuum of institutional reciprocity, as well as how reciprocity might be seeded into the core functions of archives to bridge distances between communities and archival institutions. Inspired by recent scholarship in museum studies, the article concludes with a vision of "otherwising" to explore alternative possibilities that can be realized when we adopt reciprocity as an archival practice.

Through the use of feminist historiography this article examines some of the myriad ways in which feminist praxis has pushed against, challenged, enriched, dismantled, assimilated or otherwise affected archival theory and practice. We contend that archival theory and practice have yet to fully engage with a feminist praxis that is aimed at more than attaining better representation of women in archives. We begin this piece by tracing the ways in which archives became embedded in feminist social movements and can be understood as critical tools and modes of self-representation and self-historicization. In the second section, we consider the explicit presence of feminist theory in archival studies literature and contemporary practice and the key focal points and arguments that have challenged traditional understandings of archival work around gender. We then address, in the third section, the expansive figure of the archives in humanities and social science literature. This piece contributes significantly to thinking on the ways in which these conversations in the archival turn can, at their best, expose blind spots within the archival literature and provide us with theoretical tools to tackle what we take for granted. Finally, we offer ways in which we see critical and intersectional feminist theory can contribute to existing archival discourse and practice, critiquing concepts that have remained unquestioned such as community and organization. This piece exposes the transformational potential of feminism for archives and of archives for dismantling the heteronormative, capitalist and racist patriarchy.

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.

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, 2018

This article explores the role of archival research in understanding and generating social histories from the perspectives of four different doctoral students as they reflect on their archival research experiences. We argue that archival research is complex, subjective, contextual, and at times, incomplete. Our various perspectives address ideas of privilege, representation, what it means to remember (or forget), how archives are constituted and reconstituted, and where we can make meaning in archival spaces. This article demonstrates that although archival research has had a presence in Composition and Rhetoric for some time, that presence is continually shifting, and even when embarking on archival research with comparable exigencies, the undertaking and experiences of that work is inconsistent. This article, therefore, explores the inconsistencies present in archival work, arguing that part of understanding archival research is understanding varied archival research experiences, perspectives, and understandings.

The archive has been theorized as unstable and even fever-ridden, but what might it mean to deploy it in ways that counter its logic, or to activate it in ways that we might call queer? Using the example of Leah DeVun’s photographic exploration of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (the world’s largest LGBT research collection), this essay traces the manners in which an archive, as a repository of information, might always shore up certain histories while delimiting others. In contrast, the authors imagine using the archive badly – that is, not as a historian would, but through interpolation and anachronism, focusing on the archive’s feel and “mere” form. Rather than reconstructing the ways in which archival materials inhabit a discrete historical period, this essay explores what might it mean to focus our attention on the human agents that pull archival objects from circulation, as well as how such objects might circulate again. Ultimately, we consider an archive as an accretive space that continues to build up, and as a history in which we might live, rather than as a document of an already finished time.