IAW2026 Online Case Study Session: Archives for Inclusion: Access, Participation, and Community Empowerment

Mapping the Citizen Archive — A Post-Custodial Case Study of Decentralised Disaster Documentation After the 2025 Wang Fuk Court Fire by NG Wing Lam

On 26 November 2025, a catastrophic fire at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, Hong Kong killed 168 residents. Within days, citizens who are predominantly anonymous volunteers with no institutional affiliation spontaneously built a decentralised documentary ecosystem across more than a dozen digital platforms: GitHub repositories for investigative evidence, Notion pages for resource aggregation, Google Sheets for missing-persons check-in and Vercel-hosted mutual aid apps. This constitutes a new form of grassroots disaster documentation which is participatory, community-led, and radically decentralised.

This case study offers the first professional archival assessment of this ecosystem, drawing on the post-custodial archival framework (Cook, 2013; Flinn, 2007). It produces four openly licensed deliverables: (1) an ecosystem mapping and finding aid registry of 21 citizen archives using a Dublin Core application profile with EDTF date encoding; (2) a six-dimension preservation risk assessment with per-record mitigation actions; (3) an open GitHub repository with full documentation; and (4) a trilingual resource guide (English, French, Cantonese) enabling shared access.

Three findings speak to the subtheme of inclusion: first, the dominant preservation risk is custodial abandonment, not format obsolescence. Volunteer curators lack the institutional succession and leaving archives vulnerable in long term; second, three records containing missing-persons data or aggregated victim accounts require mandatory ethical review that respects community consent; and third, open-infrastructure pathways can offer migration routes that preserve community agency.

The project contributes a reusable methodology for shared stewardship of decentralised crisis archives, one that centres creator anonymity, community agency, and ethical review as non-negotiable before any technical preservation action. It demonstrates how archivists can serve, rather than supplant community-led documentation.

Sustaining what was witheld by Lupita Klauss

This case study presents an ongoing archival practice developed with and led by transracially and transnationally adopted people navigating their fragmented, manipulated, and often harmful records. Emerging from a history in which adoption expanded under “Cold War logics” of rescue and displacement, this work engages a relatively young yet increasingly vocal diaspora that refuses to remain defined by institutional silences. Grounded in oral histories, four in-depth co-creative storytelling gatherings form the core of this project. These were not designed to extract data or preserve, but to sustain by sharing knowledge, memory, and lived experience. Stories are approached as layered: composed of cover-ups, half-truths, and realisations. Through analog photography, drawing (mental mapping), and the introduction of personal objects, participants engage in adoptee-led storytelling that centers what institutional records cannot hold.

The project addresses the challenge of incompleteness and inaccessibility, shaped by unequal power relations rooted in colonial logics that continue into present-day systems. This raises critical questions around representation, and ownership of memory. In response, the work shifts from documentation toward collaboration, positioning participants as contributors. From these encounters, a participatory archival infrastructure is emerging. A database in development extends these oral histories into a shared digital space where individuals can contribute their own narratives – anonymously or otherwise – connecting displacement and records to geographies, tracing movements and routes through collective stewardship.

This project showcases how records can function as infrastructures for justice when held by the people whose lives they set out to archive, restoring dignity, enabling participation, and holding memory collectively where official records and archival practices rooted in European traditions so often fail.

The Esperanto Museum in Subirats: Preserving the Utopia of Linguistic Justice by Rubèn Fernández Asensio

Esperantism is the practice of such a radical concept of justice that it has been banished from the public imagination and declared unachievable. Few communities are as invisible and marginalized, since Esperanto is viewed as a failed utopia, denied the status of a language with its own culture and speakers. Nevertheless, the phantasmagorical memory of Esperanto continues to challenge our ability to imagine better futures.

In 2020, the collection of the Subirats Esperanto Museum was donated to the local city council. Although the municipal archive now ensures its preservation, the description and use of the collection is impossible without mastering the language, creating the risk of “Latinizing” Esperanto by presenting it as a dead language and depriving its speakers of access. Furthermore, the community-based nature of the Esperanto collections and their transnational character challenge the methods and concepts of traditional archival science.

To process the collection efficiently, professionally, and respectfully, rather than relying solely on community volunteers, in February 2026 the city council hired the services of a private company that employs a certified archivist who is also an Esperantist. In this way, a preliminary inventory has been compiled of 3,272 letters written by nearly a thousand Esperantists from 62 countries between 1909 and 1990. The processing required experimenting with a descriptive scheme that reflected the collection’s unique characteristics and its great geographical diversity, based on an insider’s understanding of the interests and needs of the community that produced it. In addition to expanding archival methodology, the project has uncovered documents of great interest, such as the 38 letters written between 1932 and 1936 by the Soviet Esperantist Vsevolod Libert, in which he describes the Holodomor and the oppressive atmosphere that preceded the great Stalinist purges.

Sikhism and memory making: heritage, migration and family history by Alexander Hilkens

In 2024, KADOC started with a 3-year heritage project called ‘Sikhism and memory making’. The goal of this project is to map the heritage of the Sikh communities in Flanders and to stimulate, capture and valorize the stories of family history, migration, religion and culture in the communities.

The Sikh communities have helped shape the project throughout the entire process. From the first draft of the project plan, members of the community gave their input. A member of the Belgian National Sikh Organization is a member of the overseeing committee of the project, providing the necessary input from the community’s perspective. We also collaborated with the Belgian Sikh Youth Association for research, insights in the community and further execution of the project.

The best example of this came to be during the networking phase of the project. We visited all the gurdwaras in Flanders multiple times to discuss the needs, priorities and possible end results of the project with the communities. At the same time, we invited the communities to discover the archival collections about the Sikh communities in KADOC. Through a collection exhibition, we had a discussion with members of the communities about the need (or lack thereof) for preservation, the importance of multiperspectivity and the question of ownership of the collections.

As this is the first archival and heritage project done with the Sikh community in Flanders, we are not only building trust with the communities but also sharing different aspects about their religion, culture and place in society to the greater public. Through two exhibitions, we want to show both their religion as their personal experiences with migration and sense of belonging later in the project.