ACA 2021 Virtual Conference - June 7-11, 2021

[Dark blue and red banner of the ACA Virtual Conference 2021 - Home Improvement. Featuring drawings of a house, a hammer, a nail, a construction barrier, and a ruler]

The ACA 2021 Annual conference is approaching fast! In the Field: The ACA blog is featuring the profile of a few members who will be presenting at the conference, June 7-11, 2021. Today we are featuring the profile of Michelle Phan, recent graduate at the University of Toronto iSchool. 

Can you tell us your school and program of study? 

I am a recent graduate from the Master of Information program at the University of Toronto’s iSchool, where I specialized in dual streams of Critical Information Policy Studies and Archives and Records Management. 

What is your presentation about? 

My presentation, titled ‘Towards the Rebel Archive: Seeing Prison Abolition through embodiment, ‘value’, and process is based on approaching social justice based archival literature from the perspective of prison and police abolition. In my research, I seek to disseminate the impacts of prison abolition as praxis in the archives and observe the participatory model from the abolitionist perspective.  

My presentation will be an amalgamation of a series of research projects conducted based on sex worker advocacy networks such as Butterfly Network here in Toronto, as well as an annotation project conducted by Nigel Poor and the incarcerated men of San Quentin State Prison in California. 

What brought you to the field of archival studies and/or practice? 

I was hesitant to return to academia and archival studies for a long time because of the very visible gaps between theory and practice, particularly in the use of the term ‘decolonization’. Meanwhile, I began to engage more in critical race theory, particularly the works of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Katherine McKittrick, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez. Hernandez highlights the rebel archive in her work and this concept is what drew me to the broader frameworks of archival theory.  

What kinds of archival futures are you invested in? Where do you see change happening? What changes are needed? Where do you hope the profession will be in 10 years? 

Archives should be ultimately interested in Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty. Reciprocal and relational praxis is imperative to the way communities want to be represented.  

I continue to think to Jenn Cole’s words on relinquishing knowledge by “knowing that sometimes waiting is the work” (2019, p. 71) in changing what is valued in archival practice. I hope that a shift towards practice as process/progress encourages archivists to take time to think through decision making processes.   

Are there any other sessions at the conference that you’re excited to attend? 

I’m looking forward to so many panels! Black Archives Matter, At Home in the Community Archives: How the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives Has Evolved in Collaboration with Their Volunteers, Towards Acknowledging Emotions in Archival Education, and Dionne Brand reads from The Blue Clerk.  

ACA 2021 Virtual Conference - June 7-11, 2021

ACA 2021 Virtual Conference - June 7-11, 2021

[Dark blue and red banner of the ACA Virtual Conference 2021 - Home Improvement. Featuring drawings of a house, a hammer, a nail, a construction barrier, and a ruler]

The ACA 2021 Annual conference is approaching fast! In the Field: The ACA blog is featuring the profile of a few members who will be presenting at the conference, June 7-11, 2021. Today we are featuring the profile of Greg Bak, Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba. 

ACA 2021 Virtual Conference - June 7-11, 2021

The ACA 2021 Annual conference is approaching fast! In the Field: The ACA blog is featuring the profile of a few members who will be presenting at the conference, June 7-11, 2021. Today we are featuring the profile of Annaëlle Winand, PhD candidate at the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information de l’Université de Montréal.

[Black and white portrait of Annaëlle Winand in front of a "Creature from the Black Lagoon" poster]

Title of your presentation to the ACA 2021 conference?

What’s in Between? Archive(s) and the Unarchived and Unarchivable Space of Found Footage Cinema

Can you walk us through your academic and professional path? 

Back in Belgium, where I am from, I studied history. After I graduated, I taught for a very short time in secondary school before deciding to go back to university to specialize in archival science. I was then hired by the Archives of the University of Louvain-la-Neuve where I worked as an archivist for a little more than two years.

What brought you to the field of archival studies and practice?

I always tell the same (true!) story: at some point in my life, I declared that I wanted to work with “dead things”… How wrong was I? More seriously, while studying history, I was always working in and with archives. When I decided to re-orient my career it felt quite natural to study the very material I have been involved with for so long. The Archives were also a place I liked, and I was curious about what felt like “behind the scenes” of such institutions.

What do the theme of the ACA 2021 conference, “Home Improvement: Building Archives Through Change,” means to you in terms of overall archival orientations and practice?

The theme clearly resonates with archivists trying to be more introspective, asking what we should do about the power dynamics that exists at the core of our work. But it also asks the question: what is home? What archives have we been building so far? Does it need improvement, renovation or, more radically, foundational work? I am truly looking forward to discussing these important questions during the conferences.

Can you tell us about your research approach and perspectives?

My work emerges from the “exploitation” framework studied by Yvon Lemay and Anne Klein, which places the uses of archives as an integral part of their trajectory. What especially interests me is the non-traditional uses of archives (or material that is called archives) and how they reveal blind spots in archival science. My dissertation, for example, explores the notions of the unarchived and the unarchivable through absence, invisible, forbidden, and unthinkable.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for all, archives notwithstanding. A large part of outreach and access to archives involves physical appointments to view archives and collections. Like many other archives, I had in-person archival launches planned for the spring of 2020 that were postponed indefinitely due to the global pandemic. The launch of the S. J. V. Chelvanayakam Fonds, organized by a faculty member, the donor, and myself, was planned to have several multidisciplinary international scholars and community members who would interact with the archive and plan a talk around their findings. Through grants, we intended to fund the speakers’ travel and accommodation. Several months after our library shut down in-person services in March 2020, it was apparent that we needed to adapt our planning to fit around the long-term restrictions that many countries were facing. 

The S. J. V. Chelvanayakam Fonds is a personal and professional collection that was created in Sri Lanka. The archive was safeguarded and brought with the family when they immigrated to Canada. It was apparent that this fonds would attract many scholars from around the world, and not just Toronto. 

The event, held in February 2021, served a dual purpose: announcing the acquisition of the archive and opening the digitized portion of the collection. Four months prior to the event, we selected which digitized files were relatively low risk to release online to the public. This was done in consultation with members of the community and our international Tamil Advisory Group. Three months prior, the faculty member selected our potential speakers and researchers. The finding aid was released online as well as the approved digital professional files. In the final two months prior to the event began the logistics and promotional planning which entailed a great deal of work. For the logistics planning, I found planning a clear timeline, schedule, tasks, and roles of participants, using a tool like Excel or other planning tool, was immensely helpful to track all of the details. 

Statistics:

Pre-registered: 287 

Attended: 196  

Number of attendees who registered in advance and attended: 122 

Number of attendees who registered day-of and attended: 74 

Countries attended: 8 (Canada, France, India, Netherlands, Norway, Sri Lanka, UK, USA) 

Total time of event: 183 minutes 

Average attendee time: 105 minutes 

We expected that this launch would garner international interest and planned accordingly. We chose to plan the webinar launch at 9am EST, a time at which we hoped that many people from Sri Lanka could join, which is 10.5 hours ahead of EST. Luckily, our institution has access to the Zoom webinar feature which allows for an unlimited number of people and we also used the Interpretation feature so we could make the event bilingual in Tamil, the other language of the fonds. Of course, this launch was not planned in a silo. We had the benefit of working with our Informational and Technology Services department, who helped us set up the Zoom webinar registration according to our preferences, as well as hosting a trial webinar one day prior to the event that proved to be essential with the organizers, speakers, and interpreter. We had a number of staff on hand to assist day-of, with such tasks as fielding questions in the Zoom Q & A box, and also switching the cameras between speakers. After creating promotional posters and emails, our communications team and alumni relations helped spread the word of the event through social media and listservs.  

There were both advantages and disadvantages in having an online archival launch. A clear advantage is that the budget was significantly less than what would have been necessary for an in-person event. As we wanted to invite several international scholars and speakers, there was no need to pay for flight and hotel costs. One of the greatest obstacles overcome by an online launch is breaking the barrier of access: we had a significant number of 196 attendees who attended from eight countries. One of the disadvantages is not being able to provide technical support to attendees, or the event not reaching possible attendees due to lack of technical knowledge or access to Zoom. We tried to overcome this by making registration information very clear. We sent out many reminders to pre-registrants, which included the Zoom link to the webinar, including one final reminder the morning of the event. As you can see from the statistics, however, 74 people still registered the day of the event, which proves that day-of mass communication of the event is essential. To overcome any technical obstacles for attendees, we had slides during the first five minutes of the webinar demonstrating how to turn on the Interpretation feature and how to ask a question. Every five to ten minutes, these instructions were repeated in the chat to new participants and for reminders.  

We did not know what to expect for an online archive launch but the feedback we received greatly exceeded our expectations, most likely thanks to our speakers who used the archive creatively and thoughtfully in their presentations. Our attendees were engaged all throughout, seeing as how many attendees stayed throughout most of the 183 minutes of the webinar. The attendees also asked thought-provoking questions during the Q & A period. Based on my experience organizing this online archive launch, online events can be as engaging as in-person events. In this scenario, we reached a wider audience than would have been possible at a physical archive launch. If you are curious about hosting an online archives event, please take a look at our webinar recording for the S. J. V. Chelvanayakam Fonds.

Tanis Franco

Tanis Franco is the Archivist at the University of Toronto Scarborough where they acquire, process, and facilitate access to archives and digital collections in the Archives and Special Collections unit. Franco has over 9 years of experience working with archives in university and cultural heritage settings and holds a Master of Information Studies from McGill University and a Master of English Literature from Concordia University.

As any young professional will know, having the support and guidance of senior staff can be the biggest blessing and privilege. Their words of wisdom and wealth of experience are invaluable and can make the difference in a young professional’s career.  For me, one of those people is Paulette Dozois (PD), now retired Senior Lead Archivist at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Paulette spoke to me in early February about her career, a phone call that lasted only an hour but that could have continued for days.

Without mentioning any dates (!!) Paulette told me about the beginning of her career working at LAC as an Assistant Archivist in Private Records (or the Manuscript Division) and then as an Archivist (HR-02), where she worked on the MacKenzie King diaries, the Robert Borden fonds, the “four unknowns” — John Abbott, John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell and Charles Tupper —  then the Richard B. Bennett fonds. Following her time here she transferred to Public Records (also known as Government Records) where she had many different responsibilities but settled with the Department of External Affairs fonds (Foreign Affairs) for twenty years. Her final ten years at LAC were spent working on the Block Review project with the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) group.

In addition to her time in the Archives Division at LAC, Paulette also spent a year in Policy, a year at the Directorate of History and Heritage at the Department of National Defense, and spent some time working on a contract with the Yukon Archives in Private Records.

Paulette was awarded the Archives Association of Ontario’s JJ Talman award in 2020 —  a testament to her dedication and leadership in the archival profession. Heralded as a champion of researcher’s rights, Paulette received the award for “her innovative approach to access” through the “identification and examination of representative parts of the archival record and opening the records based on the findings.” The full text of the award citation is available online and includes a very funny anecdote about white gloves!

Caption: Image of Paulette Dozois, courtesy of Rodney Carter.

Alt-text: A photograph of Paulette Dozois wearing a red scarf.

RM: What did you study?  Did you choose your degree based on a desire to work in archives?

PD: "There was none of that back in the dark ages!"

Paulette holds a Master of Arts in Canadian History from Carleton University. While completing her work for this degree she did research at the then Public Archives of Canada and was inspired by the work she saw being done there. She said that she’s an "unedumacated archivist"!

This led to an interesting discussion about the formal education of archivists in Canada. Paulette told me about the aptly-named “Archives course” that new archivists took within about the first five years of being hired. It was a 6-week course delivered by the Public Archives of Canada to archivists across the country with upwards of 50 students at a time.

Through the course she learned the “basics of archives.” During that era, PAC had three types of archivists: special media, private and government. There were no reference or access archivists then as each group of archivists did their own reference work. But with the advent of Access to Information and Privacy legislation, government records were being transferred to LAC “in tsunamis [and] Reference Services came into being as a point of necessity because of the volume of requests.”

Paulette told me that “when she started, the [Prime Minister] records up to St. Laurent were all right there on the 3rd floor of [395 Welllington]! You could just walk down the hall and get a box and bring it down to your desk. The government archivists were up on the 7th floor with the tiny windows! Users were sent right upstairs to see archivists; the building was much more open in that way.”

Caption: Photograph of Library and Archives Canada Ottawa research facility at 395 Wellington Street in Ottawa, Ontario.  Photograph by Sophie Tellier (LAC).

Alt text: Image of large building flanked by banners that read “Library and Archives Canada - Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.”

RM: What were your impressions of the field, or of the work, when you "joined"? 

PD: The field was "predominantly, overwhelmingly male and now it's mostly female I think. When I was in the manuscript division first, there were a few women who'd been there a while, the government archives division, when I put my name on the transfer list, the equal opportunities for women had cited the division because there were no female [archivists], just one female [senior archivist] Barbara Wilson.” Paulette did emphasize that she “never had any trouble, [her colleagues were] very respectful.”

RM: Looking back, what are some of the major shifts you've lived through with regard to archival work?

PD: "[In] the beginning the archivist did almost all function: reference, custodial, appraisal, acquisition. […] The archivist was really in charge of those records. You did it all. Over time, the amount of authority that a particular archivist has over a fonds has diminished. [...] It had to happen. [...] So much changed when ATIP came in. Our responsibilities increased intensely."

Her advice is that "archivists should be part of the decisions," because silos won’t serve the record well. “There is just one record.”

I asked Paulette about her involvement with the ACA.

PD: “[I] started in the early 1980s on the membership committee, and then the membership chair for a long time. Then I was on the Public Relations committee and I was chair when we did the booklets like Business Archives." Paulette recalls organizing a pop-up frame to set up behind the table at events, getting the ACA out and present in the community. She started publishing and giving papers, and was on the editorial team for Archivaria for a while. At this point in the interview Paulette paused as if this was the extent of it, only to continue by mentioning that she was on 4 or 5 program committees for conferences, chaired the Newfoundland conference program committee in 1993 (Between The Rock and a Hard Place: Archival Theory and Practice). And it didn’t stop there: "I was the one who got approval for the special interest section on access and privacy issues in the 1990s." Paulette also spoke to the importance of the annual conference as an opportunity to establish and maintain the "links across the country that make the ACA a strong organization."

Caption: Cover page of the Business Archives booklet published by the ACA in 2000.  Copyright Association of Canadian Archivists.

Alt-text: A blue and white rectangular image that serves as the cover page for a booklet entitled “Business Archives” with various images representing industry such as an oil rig, textual documents, machines, a satellite and a factory-like setting.

RM: What advice might you give to a young or aspiring archivist?

PD: "Dress properly (laughter). You know there was a time it was unheard of for an archivist to show up with jeans on. Just not done. [...] Have fun! If there's one word to describe how I feel about my career it's LUCKY. There were some tough times but we got through them."

I think I speak for many when I say that I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with Paulette, to have had her ear, her kind smile, and to have been able to sit in the corner of her very full office furiously scribbling notes as she told me stories and shared her wisdom on finding aids to restricted files and a few detours in between. Congratulations to Paulette on her well-deserved retirement!

Rebecca Murray

Rebecca Murray (RM) is a Senior Archivist in the Reference Services Division at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario.  She is also a member of the ACA’s Outreach Committee and Mentorship Program.  She sometimes wears jeans to the office but will now never do so without thinking first of Paulette’s advice!

For many staff in Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAMs), it is difficult to carve out time to craft a competitive grant project, find an appropriate grant to apply for, and successfully work through the grant application.
There are resources available, but many fail to cover all areas of the grant process, and many more are too generalized to be effectively deployed in a LAM setting. Very few are comprehensive to LAMs, provide grant specifications, or offer advanced searching. There are no grant templates that allow LAM staff to plug in content and create applications. Fundamentally, there is no all-inclusive LAM grant toolkit.

Lucidea- provider of the ArchivEra and Argus collections management systems as well as industry-leading library automation and knowledge management software—partnered with grants expert Rachael Cristine Woody to provide a solution to these problems. They now deliver a single venue to meet the majority of grant needs, and have created a LAM grant toolkit—including a comprehensive grant database spanning Libraries, Archives, and Museums, with opportunities in the United States and Canada. Users can quickly see opportunities that best match their needs, with specifications such as: deadline, award range, and project theme—the most important things you must know to determine if the grant opportunity is a good fit. This resource provides LAMs with access to over $200 million annually—especially meaningful when budgets are constrained during COVID.

The toolkit is designed to empower LAM professionals by providing all the information and tools needed to confidently apply for grants. Included is a LAM grant workbook that introduces every typical grant application field and provides four grant application templates. It guides users through each application area, outlines what content is needed in order to be successful, and inspires action with four plug-and-play project frameworks.

Lucidea invites you to view the Grants Directory and/or download a copy of the grant workbook.

Rima Ghanem

Rima Ghanem is a Cultural Sector Research Analyst at Lucidea, where her primary focus is on archival and museum collection management systems. Rima holds an MA in Cultural Management from Université Saint-Joseph and an MAS from the University of British Columbia. Prior to Lucidea, Rima worked at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, and other MENA region heritage organizations.

It seemed fitting that, in preparing for an interview with Jamie A. Lee, PhD, about their new book Producing the Archival Body, I would feel an embodied manifestation of my own anticipation: a stomach-fluttering nervousness and excitement, a difficulty swallowing when considering whether or not I was up to the task, a chill in my blood when I decided I probably wasn’t.

Fortunately, Jamie A. Lee, a longtime interviewer, educator, and archivist quickly made clear that our conversation needn’t be stressful or fear-inducing: in situating our bodies -- even virtually -- they began the interview by envisioning that I’d flown to Tucson (in a non-covid world!) and that we were sitting in the unseasonably warm winter sunshine of a cafe, sipping lattes and listening to chirping birds. The physical sense of comfort and connection took hold right away to ease our discussion.

[Portrait of Jamie A. Lee, PhD, with a dark blue blazer and black-rimmed glasses. Courtesy of Jamie A. Lee]

Because Lee has been engaged in the work of documenting LGBTQ+ stories for years now, and because they have written about and presented on the Queer/ed Archival Metholodolgy extensively in recent years, Producing the Archival Body is in many ways a culmination of those experiences and efforts. “The book 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” (https://ischool.arizona.edu/people/jamie-lee). The chapters interweave theoretical application with personal anecdotes and subject interviews, and I found myself often returning to the personal stories to understand the depth and richness of the theory through those connective tissues. What follows are a few of our discussion points.

KW: Can you tell me about the journey this book has taken from dissertation to book?

JL: It's been interesting to be finishing the book, in the midst of the pandemic. It feels so good to have that out in the world. Of course, it's so nerve racking. My writing feels so personal, like your heart’s on your sleeve, and you're so vulnerable. So, this is the first time I’ve been interviewed about the book. And the first time I’ve ever written a book; I came to the academy older (I turned 50 last year, in the pandemic).

“With each inclusion and exclusion, archivists have the power to develop the historical narratives, records, and collections, as well as the archival institution.” (p. 68)

One of the starting points for the book was to think about: what relationships does the archives have to humans? I started thinking through the body, bodily functions, and human subjectivities and all that that entails to consider the archives as archival body. We each have techniques, embodied techniques, that we use in our everyday lives. What are they and how do they carry into our work as archivists. And as archivists, we have all of these [archival] practices, but sometimes it feels more like we’re putting widgets into cogs on assembly lines because we can do them without critically thinking and reflecting upon what we’re doing and why. We’re not asked to pause and to see the big picture of the humans and the many complexities that make the records and the archives, and make the ideas of memory meaningful, and be important and be valued. These are the issues at the center of my work, including not only my published manuscript but also my ongoing research projects, multimedia projects, and public-facing digital humanities projects. I am interested in how to recognize, acknowledge, and work with nuance and complexity. 

In 2008, Lee founded the Arizona LGBTQ Storytelling Project, Arizona’s first LGBTQ archives. Since 2011, this project has expanded into the Arizona Queer Archives, AQA, which has become an archival laboratory of sorts where community members and graduate/undergraduate students work together on building the archives. It is in these collaborative spaces where Lee continues to develop and apply a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, to support archivists through rapidly changing information environments and the implications — socially, culturally, and technologically — of these changes.

[Arizona Queer Archive "Made for Flight" Kites Display. Courtesy of Jamie A. Lee]

When, in 2008, I initially founded the Arizona LGBTQ Storytelling Project, what is now the AQA, I wanted to know “what do I have to do to make this the right way, to do a good job?” What I found was that the “right” ways felt like they were doing more harm to the communities -- and as a part of the community, it was my role to push back at that and to make it better. I learned so much along the way about my own assumptions, and really tried to pay attention to the relationships I have with people. I wanted to demonstrate responsibility and respect for the people I was working with. If I didn’t have that, basically I was aligning with what we, as archival studies scholars, often critique of the institutional mainstream archives.

When I started my PhD program, Professor Susan Stryker arrived at my university as the new Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies. She came with an archival background after having directed the GLBT Historical Society and History Museum in San Francisco. I took her seminar on Somatechnics and the Technologies of the Body. It was in this course that everything I thought about archives kind of blew apart. That was where I began to realize that the body is so central to everything we do. While I wrote my dissertation, I drew from somatechnics literatures, queer theorists, and also from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s 25 Projects central to decolonizing methodologies to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology. I really wanted to both center temporality and bodies. How do archives influence people? How do we see interconnections between people in the archives? 

Those were the initial questions that I was building upon in moving the dissertation to the book project. The biggest thing, for me, is always the stories and the storytelling part of this work. That’s why I started each chapter with stories and put myself out there personally to say, “This matters to me because these are my histories too.” I’m a part of all these things, and there’s no way to discount the body and to break apart the body from each of these records. 

KW: Who did you envision reading this book when you were writing it? And how would you teach it in your classroom?

JL: I could see community archivists picking up the book and being inspired. I’d want them to recognize that theory is emerging in their own everyday work within their home communities. Students in archival studies, in gender and women’s studies, in rhetoric, maybe in digital humanities would be able to find information here to think about the role the archives plays in all these areas -- maybe in understanding composition or how the stories come together. 

[Selfie photo of Hope Herr-Cardillo processing Jay Kyle Petersen’s Collection, 2017. Courtesy of Jamie A. Lee]

In my own classroom, I could see teaching a couple of chapters, especially the one on the finding aid [Chapter 2, which includes an extensive section on reimagining the place of archivist’s personal reflections in the archiving process]. The postmodern turn in archival studies is still important in today’s classrooms. In the book, I considered incorporating posthumanism as heuristic, a tool, to inquire into the relationships between archives and humans. I know a lot of students are interested in thinking about things like the etymology of terms, what do those terms mean when we bring them to bear on our own collections and collecting practices?

“...archivists rarely return to finding aids to attend to time, the shifting bodies of records creators and bodies of knowledge, and any descriptive mistakes or needed revisions....Therefore, I understand that developing the conversational aspect of the finding aid is a way for the AQA to embody its participatory ethos.” (p. 58)

KW: That view seems like it’s part of the idea that we build the world we want to live in -- at least as archivists and archival studies educators. 

JL: Yes. We have more power to do good than we think we do. We think there are so many gatekeepers around who aren’t going to let us do what we want or need to do, but we just need someone to say “Yes, I’ll do it.” Someone said to me 12 or 13 years ago that since I had the filmmaking equipment and local elder LGBTQ people were dying, I should collect their stories. I said “yes.” And that was how I started Arizona’s first LGBTQ archives. We have a lot of power to collect and build our histories and to shape all of the many nuanced narratives that don’t often get a chance to be seen. 

KW: Who are some of the most significant influences on your work?

JL: When I first read Jasbir Puar’s book Terrorist Assemblages, Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination -- those three books knocked my socks off in my first semester of my doctoral studies. Professor Frank Galarte worked closely with me in this first semester to challenge my assumptions and grow my ideas of the archives and what they can do. I’ve always been curious about time, space, and the understanding of our bodies in that time and space, and where that all overlaps with archives. Those three books really opened up doors for me to just try on ideas and noodle my way through it.

KW: How would you characterize your methodology?

Lee has written extensively on Queer/ed Methodology, which informs much of their work and this book.

JL: I bring in a queer methodology; not just a queer theoretical lens, but a way to use a queer methodology to also suggest storytelling as a method. It goes beyond the act of collecting the story to the act of telling the story. I think that we should pay attention to thinking about what stories these records will tell, and then put the records into the collection in that way. It’s a way to understand relationality.

“Like both haunting and decolonizing as temporal methods of producing and consuming archives, queering provides a means for reimagining normative assumptions within archives and about the bodies of knowledges therein." (p. 78)

KW: What do you want readers, current and future, to know about Producing the Archival Body?

JL: The book is similar to my own personal trajectory in the archives, including me entering the archives as a non-academic social justice activist. So we can see the ways we move through and have different journeys when we’re working in archives. I would like our students to learn in the classroom that we’re all wrestling with these same ideas, and that we can make different inroads and interventions. I’d like our students to have the confidence to push for social justice and make change in whatever archives they’re working in. 

There’s a quote from one of my earlier documentary films that has stuck with me. Pastor Anita Hill was ordained by St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church; she was a lesbian and would not divorce her partner or be celibate. At her ordination, we interviewed Bishop Krister Stendahl who said, “The drop makes a hole in the stone, not by its weight, but by constantly dropping.” Thinking about social justice, it’s not like one big thing is going to change it. But it has to be all of these little drops continuing to drop. How can we spread this urgency to make change? Even if it's small and incremental, it could be lasting. So how do we do it?

Kristen Whitson

Kristen Whitson has a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and she has worked in digital preservation, community and indigenous archives, and LGBTQ+ archives. She is currently a Program Assistant with Recollection Wisconsin.

Jamie A. Lee is Assistant Professor of Digital Culture, Information, and Society in the School of Information – Arizona’s iSchool – at the University of Arizona, where their research and teaching attend to critical archival theory and methodologies, multimodal media-making contexts, storytelling, and bodies. For more information about Lee’s research, visit their website: www.thestorytellinglab.io

Last October, I was invited to present at the Archive/Counter-Archive 2020 Symposium. The theme for the symposium was Black lives and archival histories in Canada. My presentation took place on December 11, 2020, as part of “Panel 1: Place-based/Institutional Engagements with Black Histories.” The organizing committee reached out to me after a former co-worker shared my blog post, “Archiving Hate: Racist Materials in Archives.” They were interested in my perspective on how racism should be addressed in archival training and pedagogy. The issue of racism and oppression in archives was rarely addressed during my studies at McGill University’s School of Information Studies. Regardless, I was aware of how deeply ingrained “neutrality” was in archival education and practice. I decided to focus my presentation on anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches to archival pedagogy and training in Canada. While these approaches are not new, I argued that they are poorly incorporated into Canadian archival education and training. The research aspect of my presentation was challenging. The prevalence of neutrality in Library and Information Studies (LIS) programs and the archival profession is well known. However, more research studies are needed to understand how critical theory and practices are incorporated into archival education and training in Canada. Despite this, I was able to gather evidence for my presentation.

Archive/Counter Archive 2020 Symposium poster featuring the panelists and the event details

I started my research by gaining a greater understanding of various anti-racist and anti-oppressive theories and how they have been applied in practice. There has been an emergence of scholarship and community-centred archival initiatives that look critically at traditional archival practices. These efforts have led to the creation of several critical approaches to archiving including decolonization, postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, and deconstructionism. My next step was to research how these critical theories and practices were integrated into archival pedagogy and training.

In terms of examining archival pedagogy, I  reviewed several LIS programs in Canada to find archival course descriptions and syllabi. This was challenging, as some programs published vague course descriptions, outdated syllabi, or there were no syllabi publicly listed. I identified a few programs that included some critical theories and practices in their curriculum. However, when I spoke to a few recent graduates in my network who completed those programs, they had issues with how those critical theories and practices were integrated. In their experience, one former student explained that international examples of critical practices were emphasized over those in the Canadian context. Another former student found that critical perspectives were tokenized rather than included as foundational knowledge. They found that the instructors poorly facilitated conversations around racism and other forms of oppression.

After searching for a more in-depth examination of this issue, I came across two publications: “Education for the Common Good: A Student Perspective on Including Social Justice in LIS Education” by students from the Master of Library & Information Science (MLIS) program at Western University and "A Report on Diversity and Inclusion Experiences at the Faculty of Information" from various student groups at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. These publications addressed the issue of “neutrality” in their programs and made several suggestions for instructors to move towards more anti-oppressive pedagogy. Amongst these suggestions,  it was recommended that instructors receive formal training in facilitating conversations surrounding race, sexuality, gender, and disability.

As I was searching for an example of an archival course with anti-oppressive frameworks, I discovered that the School of Information Studies at McGill University hired Gracen Brilmyer as a new Assistant Professor. Gracen’s website states that their research interests are “located at the intersection of critical archival studies and disability studies.” Gracen also disclosed that they identify as a “disabled and chronically ill white, queer, non-binary person from a middle-class background.” I was excited that the School of Information Studies hired a professional with an under-represented perspective and research interest. Given Gracen’s positionality and research  interests, I wanted to know if they took an anti-oppressive approach to their pedagogy. I contacted Gracen and they agreed to speak with me. Gracen explained that they were hired to redesign the Organization of Information course, which is a required first-year course. They also will be looking at the program’s archive-specific courses and considering how they can be restructured.

Gracen told me that their education included critical perspectives and cultural competency training that was specific to the information studies field. With that background, Gracen said they take a critical and anti-oppressive approach to their pedagogy. The Organization of Information course was redesigned to look at traditional and critical theories and practices together. Perspectives and scholarship from professionals that belong to Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) and other marginalized communities are included as required readings. As Gracen is part of the disabled community, they understand that peer-reviewed journals can be seen as a barrier to marginalized communities looking to publish their content. Peer-reviewed journals may reject a perspective, heavily edit submitted content, or hide publications behind a paywall. To address this issue, Gracen includes a range of content that is produced by professionals that belong to diverse communities. Some examples include a blog post, video, or tweet. The course consists of lectures, guest lectures and workshops from professionals who do radical work, and hands-on, problem-based learning. The assignments and activities ask students to think critically about the impact of organizing systems and practices. Based on my experience with the previous iteration of this course, I think that Gracen made some well-needed changes to the course.

In terms of archival training in Canada, I failed to find a publication or an article that examined how anti-racist or anti-oppressive approaches were integrated.  To get a sense of the archival training offered, I searched the websites of several archival associations and conducted general searches online. There are a few issues with this. It was difficult to see what type of archival training was offered in the past or anticipate what may be offered again in the future. It was also difficult to locate archival training through keyword searches as different terminology may be used to describe the training. I tried different terminologies such as “anti-racist,” “anti-oppression,” “Indigenous,” and “critical.”

Most of the archival training I found provided “neutral” approaches to professional development. For example, I  identified an archival training on Rules for Archival Description (RAD) that did not include anti-racist approaches to description practices. Some archival training opportunities looked at oppression or marginalization. However, when I read the description or contacted the instructor, I realized that  these training opportunities were not intended to guide archivists on how to apply anti-oppressive practices. There are a few informal, participant-driven conversations for archivists to discuss and share their knowledge on anti-oppressive practices. I decided to reach out to my network and spoke to several archivists in Ontario and Quebec who have an understanding of current archival training in Canada. They acknowledged that more archive-specific anti-oppressive training would be beneficial for addressing issues in the archival profession.  Some of them provided me with suggestions for anti-oppressive training. An example that stood out to me was training on how to provide reference services to BIPOC researchers in light of offensive language in legacy finding aids and historic materials. I also performed online research to find examples of anti-oppressive archival training from the United States. I found a few recorded webinars of critical training for librarians and archivists. One webinar offered training on how to critique library policies, procedures, and practices with an anti-racist analysis.

As my research shows, more work is needed for Canadian archival education and training to challenge “neutrality” in the profession. This will help prepare students to work with diverse communities and support archivists in challenging oppressive practices. While there is a lack of best practices, there are resources as well as archive and community-based initiatives that can provide a framework for emerging and practicing archivists to do anti-oppressive work.

Melissa Nelson

Melissa Nelson is a second-generation Jamaican Canadian from Toronto, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in History, with a minor in Sociology, from Carleton University. She also completed a Master of Information Studies at McGill University. Her experience includes working at George Brown College Archives, The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives, the Law Society of Ontario Archives, and Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Melissa currently works freelance as an archival consultant. Melissa conducts research and produces content on history and archive related topics for her website melissajnelson.com.

The 9^th International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (ICHORA), held virtually by the University of Michigan School of Information, featured a variety of presentations and keynote speeches. Given the scope of the conference and the quality of the speakers, ICHORA constitutes a good indicator of the current state of archival research and research about archives. The theme of the conference, with a full week-long program starting on October 26, 2020, Archives and the Digital World, allowed for multiple discussions and perspectives that testified to the power of the digital in the overall direction of archival research and practice. 

[ICHORA 2020 yellow and light blue poster with the title of the conference, the location, and the Michigan University logo. Featuring an 1980s looking computer]

Past ICHORA conferences gave birth to groundbreaking and innovative scholarship that challenged and changed archival theory and practice. From Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd’s presentation about community archives – which led to the article “Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream” – to Jeannette A. Bastian’s “Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation” and Tom Nesmith’s “Reopening Archives: Bringing New Contextualities into Archival Theory and Practice,” ICHORA has been a fertile ground for the dynamic evolution of archival theory throughout the twenty-first century. 

This year’s edition featured a range of presentations that will certainly leave their mark in the archival realm and beyond. Multidisciplinary research is now established as part of the nature of archival studies. This has brought new horizons where a plurality of fields, including anthropology, media studies, history, gender studies, postcolonial studies, computer science, digital humanities, and others have contributed to the expansion of archival studies. On the other hand – and this is something that was evident by the type of research presented during the conference – increasingly, the diversity of archival research is also penetrating other academic fields. 

Marisa Elena Duarte’s keynote speech set the tone for rich conversations that marked the five days of the conference. Duarte’s eloquent connection between the digital and the birth of new worlds, and on notions around digital bodies of knowledge, testified to the extent of archival relationships and power. Duarte mentioned that “the technically powerful archive is but a shadow of the relationships among us.” As Duarte brilliantly put forward, data sovereignty, digital literacy, and radical empathy signal the dynamic engagement of archives and digital archival conceptions in the shaping of memory and digital relations. 

Discussions of digitization practices and the impact of the digital world resonated with Duarte’s perspective on knowledge development and the relational encounters of archives. Tomla Ernestine Tatah Lukong, for example, talked about the challenges faced by the Cameroon National Archives. Drawing attention to the volume of records created in Cameroon institutions, alongside financial and infrastructural challenges, Tatah Lukong offered a compelling account of archival advocacy oriented toward bridging the gap in the archives, and on the importance of community engagement in the trajectory of the national archives. While digitization and digital practices have been presented as crucial players that contribute to historical knowledge and access to records, other presentations highlighted darker impulses of digital initiatives and use. Katharina Hering discussed the potential crumbling of historical contexts around digital records represented in the database Ancestry.com. Acknowledging the immense market power of the genealogy-based platform, Hering highlighted that the maximization of access to records could be made at the expense of political and ethical concerns associated with private information. By paying attention to the participation of public archives in the development and expansion of Ancestry, Hering presented compelling arguments about the importance of the relationality of records and their context, and the responsibilities of archivists who work with public records.

The manipulation of records and their digital afterlives was further emphasized by a keynote speech given by Tonia Sutherland. Sutherland presented a powerful account aligned with social and cultural tensions associated with the use of what was called “digital remains.” The speaker provided an exposé concerning the commodification of Black bodies and the deaths of black people in digital spaces. Sutherland mentioned that, through the use of images and records about the death of Black people, social and political forces are extending the lives of Black people, and ultimately changing their present and future narratives. Sutherland argued that while offering new uses and recontextualizations, the sharing of records through digital platforms and in the media is deconstructing the agency and the realities of Black lives and death. Accordingly, this use of Black bodies was presented as being performative, where imaginations and projection of narratives ultimately separated the Black body imaginary from the lived experiences of Black peoples. Sutherland identified this process as being very dangerous. In talking about the digital afterlife, Sutherland insisted that race, records, and the violence of archival processes converged. Furthermore, Sutherland presented the digital afterlives of records portraying, using, and recirculating Black death as being part of expansive colonial powers in the digital world.

Critical views of the digital resonated throughout the conference. Critical lenses on digitization, technology, and archival standards powerfully illustrated colonial conceptions of archival practice. James Lowry, for instance, indicated that normative procedures of the ISO standard emerged from a universalist and colonial framework. This association of documentation standards with the legacies of colonialism was echoed by a presentation given by Hannah Turner, who has done research on the history of documentation in an ethnographic museum. Turner signaled the importance of studying documentation in order to situate ethnographic knowledge development. In doing so, Turner highlighted the durable and performative qualities of documentation technology and situated its crucial role in colonial knowledge production and limitations. Ayantu Tibeso, in turn, challenged conceptions of colonialism, exclusion, and marginalization by drawing attention to the silencing of Oromo peoples through recordkeeping practices in Ethiopia. By situating these activities through a colonial frame of reference, Tibeso reflected on the dynamic nature of colonial practices and of the importance of ancient oral recordkeeping practices in archival spaces. Diana Marsh pursued this theme, providing strategies and practices conceived to fill the gap in Indigenous knowledge, through the power of the digital and of digitization. Marsh reiterated that understanding the impact of digitization on Indigenous research is crucial when crafting archival processes, insisting on themes such as historical sovereignty, representational belonging, and the limits of digital knowledge sharing. 

All of these notions forced the participants to reflect on traditional archival conceptions of provenance. New perspectives of the concept of provenance was the highlight of two rich presentations. In discussing two feminist activist archives, Jessica Lapp offered a critical analysis to provenance, by proposing what is defined as “provenancial fabulation.” Lapp talked about the many variables associated with records creation, by insisting on the imaginative process of archival creation. Furthermore, Lapp discussed the dynamic and temporal characteristics of provenance, through structures and infrastructures, and ultimately through feminist perspectives that challenge official historical narratives. Gracen Brilmyer put forward the concept of crip provenance, by highlighting the creation of records about disabled people made from the perspective of people in power. Brilmyer argued that traditional notions of provenance contribute to historical absence, erasures, and partial and non-existence evidence. While doing so, Brilmyer offered a critique of this sense of wholeness to recordkeeping, formulated by traditional visions of provenance. Moreover, they indicated that restoring some sort of order to records can provoke inequities and further marginalize people with disabilities. 

If the impact of archival research and the innovations of archival theory were unequivocally expressed throughout the conference, a pertinent question was at the heart of the panel discussion in honour of Richard J. Cox. David Wallace, Lindsey Mattock, Joel Blanco-River, and the host of the conference Ricky Punzalan attempted to respond to the question posed by the moderator, Jeannette Bastian: Is archival work more a profession or part of a discipline? Based on the responses of the members of the panel, if it is a profession, it is heavily subject to academic directions; and if it is more a discipline, it is a discipline ingrained in practical articulations. David Wallace spoke about the ethics of archival work, being engaged in research and writing. He mentioned that the academic dimension improves the intellectual positioning of archival work. On a personal note, Wallace testified that the social and cultural scope of archival endeavours and research was, for him, a “salvation.” Blanco-Rivera, for his part, emphasized the multidimensional aspects of teaching to highlight the reach of archival theory and practice. Mattock added to this by mentioning that archival studies is an academic discipline that informs practice, with its own intellectual history. To conclude, Ricky Punzalan framed archival studies and practice from a multidisciplinary perspective, suggesting that these discussions do not need to be informed by this binary (profession/discipline), but should rather be thought in terms of a duality that emphasizes the importance of connectivity in the development of archival thinking. 

Various connections between digital spaces, archival records, and the scope of archival work was reiterated in the final keynote address given by Margaret Hedstrom. Problematizing the use and the ubiquity of the term “curation” in public spaces and social media, Hedstrom associated the power of the digital with surveillance capitalism. Hedstrom offered explanations that touched on the commodification of people and their representations in the archives, and how curatorial practices in the archives must be deliberate and better defined to counter the neoliberal and authoritarian impulses of surveillance capitalism in the digital world. 

The richness of the various presentations certainly evoked the multidisciplinary and multifaceted scope of archival initiatives and research. While discussions of social justice, colonialism, and social movements emerged – alongside conceptions and the reach of the digital – the different panels convincingly highlighted the impact of archival thinking and archival involvement in the direction of a plurality of memories and memories’ conceptions. ICHORA 2020 certainly left important intellectual trails that will push archival theory toward new areas of research and practice.

François Dansereau

François Dansereau is the Senior Archivist at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada and a course lecturer at the McGill University School of Information Studies. He is the author of the chapter “Men, Masculinities, and the Archives: Introducing the Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity in Archival Discourse” in the volume Archives and Special Collections as Sites of Contestation (2020), and of the article “The Portrayal of Gender in Health Care: An Examination of Hospital Photographic Archives” (Archivaria 90, Fall 2020). Dansereau holds an MA in History from Université de Montréal and a MLIS with a concentration in archives from McGill University.