Activating archives: What community archives can teach us about autonomy and reparation
Channel: War Studies KCL
Date: 2022-03-18

Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, this talk looked toward the radical politics of autonomous minoritized identity-based community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Based on more than a decade of ethnography at community archives sites including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the Dr Michelle Caswell explored how members of minoritised communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression.

By catalysing corollary records from the past, communities that steward, use and are represented by community archives learn political strategies and get inspiration. Der Caswell examined the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, ultimately arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present. She also addressed how theories of autonomy, custody, and reparation from community archives can inform survivor-centered approaches to all kinds of records. The talk drew from Caswell’s new book, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, May 2021).