by: Bergis Jules
Community-based archives hold some of the most valuable materials documenting the lives of marginalized people and they mostly exist independently of other traditional academic or government-run cultural heritage institutions. Read More…
Read MoreBy: Samip Mallick and Mishelle Caswell
Since we co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) a decade ago, we have been challenged by a number of professional archivists working for dominant Western institutions who tell us that SAADA is not an archives, in part, because of what they perceive as our fiscal precarity. How can we be committed to the long-term stewardship of materials when there is no guarantee of our organization’s long-term sustainability? Read More…
Read MoreBy: Jamie Lee
Last spring, I sat at a café across from the intern working for the Arizona Queer Archives (AQA) at that time. He wanted to meet to, among more, ask me what it was like to be an “older queer.” Read More…
Read MoreBy: Jarrett Drake
But let’s shift the statement from a declarative to an inquisitive one: Are local communities essential to the survival of community-based archives? My argument is that archivists must shift their paradigms away from the fictive notions of ‘local’ and ‘community-based’ towards a more radically precise and politically liberatory language. Read More…
Read MoreBy: Doreen Foster
Back in 1981 when Len Garrison the principal founder of Black Cultural Archives and his colleagues lamented the impact that alienation from the majority culture and racism was having on young black Britons they believed that the creation of a museum that held all the stories of black presence in Britain was part of the answer. Read More…
Read MoreBy: Yusef Omowale
During the last several years increasing effort has been made to identify how community-based archives can best ameliorate the oppressive effects of dominant archival institutions, as well as support the ongoing labor of what is most generally understood as social justice work. There is seeming consensus as to what a community-based archive should do, and how it should conduct itself. But what is it that will make this work possible? That’s is, what are the core values that enable the sustainability of archives that, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, were never meant to survive? Read More…
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