IAW2026 Online Case Study Session: Archives for Memory: Recognition, Human Dignity, and Lived Experience

Preserving Voices of Survival: Oral Histories, Gendered Memory, and Human Dignity in the Liberation War Museum Archive by Sofia Nazneen

This case study explores the preservation of oral histories and personal testimonies related to survivors of sexual violence during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War through the archival initiatives of the Liberation War Museum. The project reflects on how archives can serve as spaces of recognition, dignity, and historical inclusion for communities whose experiences have often remained marginalised or silenced within official historical narratives.

The Liberation War Museum has played a significant role in collecting, preserving, and interpreting testimonies connected to wartime violence, displacement, and survival. As part of the museum’s archival work, oral histories and survivor testimonies were documented and preserved to ensure that lived experiences became part of the historical record for future generations. These collections contribute not only to historical research but also to broader processes of social remembrance and public acknowledgement.

This presentation will examine the ethical and emotional complexities involved in preserving testimonies connected to trauma and gender-based violence. It considers questions of consent, representation, sensitivity, long-term preservation, and access within archival practice. The case study also reflects on the importance of oral history methodologies in contexts where official documentation is incomplete or absent, particularly in relation to women’s experiences during conflict.

By foregrounding survivor narratives, this study will demonstrate how archives can challenge historical erasure and contribute to restoring human dignity through memory work. The presentation will argue that community-centred archival practices are essential for building inclusive historical narratives and for recognising the experiences of individuals whose voices have historically been excluded from institutional archives. Through this work, the Liberation War Museum archive contributes to ongoing international conversations about archives, gendered memory, trauma, and the preservation of lived experience.

The Malta Thalidomide Scandal - Restoring memory and human dignity by James Baldacchino

The Thalidomide scandal was the “biggest anthropogenic medical disaster ever”. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, the drug thalidomide was prescribed to pregnant women for morning sickness. Instead, the drug caused a global medical controversy as it caused thousands of babies worldwide to be born with severe deformities, especially missing or underdeveloped limbs.

In Malta, the drug was still being sold by the mid-1960s, turning the newly independent island state into an overseas test centre for unwanted medicinal stock. An untold number of families were affected by the continued issue of this drug, resulting in a level of trauma which has never been quantified.

For decades, this scandal was shrouded in institutional silence. Official reports and statistics do not capture what fully happened. It is in this scenario, that the National Archives of Malta’s oral history project – MEMORJA – moved in to fill the historical void and give Thalidomide survivors the voice they had been denied for many years.

The oral history and video interviews which have recorded have provided survivors the space and the platform to speak at length about the physical, emotional and social toll this scandal has had on their lives. The reverberations of this project have resulted in a survivors-led media campaign bringing to light government failures, publications detailing state inaction and survivors pushing for official compensation. This in turn has helped the wider public better understand the roles that oral history and archives can play in restoring memory and human dignity.

What the Archive Holds: Trauma-Informed Archival Practice and the Work of Justice by Rhonda D. Jones

This case study explores how trauma-informed archival practice can contribute to justice, accountability, and collective memory through the work of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), Northeastern University School of Law. The project investigates racially motivated killings in the United States during the Jim Crow era that were historically ignored or inadequately addressed by legal systems. By assembling and interpreting fragmented archival records, such as court documents, newspaper accounts, and state files, CRRJ demonstrates how archives can support recognition, redress, and public understanding.

Drawing on frameworks from the Peace and Justice Center’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) seminar, this study situates archival work within broader systems of trauma, unhealed harm, and cycles of institutional silence. It examines how core archival practices—description, metadata creation, access decisions, and processing- can either reproduce harm or interrupt it. It highlights the ethical challenges of working with incomplete or biased records, of restoring victims' identities, and of engaging descendant communities in meaningful ways.

This case reframes archives as active participants in justice processes rather than neutral repositories. It asks: How can archivists responsibly represent histories of violence? What does accountability look like in archival practice? And how can access be structured to balance transparency with care?

By aligning archival methods with trauma-informed approaches, this case contributes to global conversations on #ArchivesForJustice. It offers a model for integrating archival practice with human rights work, emphasizing the role of archives in shaping not only memory, but also possibilities for acknowledgment, repair, and more just futures."

Ek Khaale: Once Upon a Time - The Rohingya: A Visual Restoration by Gregory Constantine

Today, nearly all visual representations of the Rohingya ethnic community from Myanmar portray a people defined by displacement, violence, suffering and victimhood. Unlike most communities in Burma, a collective visual history of the Rohingya does not exist. Successive Burmese regimes have rejected the existence of a ‘Rohingya’ community indigenous to Burma and have manufactured a historical narrative labelling the Rohingya as a threatening ‘foreign other’. This narrative has been widely accepted by the public throughout Burma. As a result, the Rohingya have endured a legacy of violence, exclusion and genocide that has dismantled long-established ways in which the Rohingya preserve, share and endorse cultural memory and identity among themselves and with others.

Ek Khaale, which is the Rohingya expression for Once Upon A Time explores, assembles and presents a visual portrait of the Rohingya community and their history before the decades of violence committed against them. Utilizing the visual, this research challenges the permanency of statuses forced upon the Rohingya over the past fifty years and disrupts the trajectory of imagery depicting displacement, erasure and on-going violence against the Rohingya. Over the past five years, this collaborative, co-participatory research project has gathered, collected and digitized hundreds of rare archival photographs, documents, letters and other visual materials displaced among the global Rohingya community, including Rohingya inside Burma. It also includes materials from public and private archives.

Ek Khaale activates these materials from the past to present a new form and shape to Rohingya history and collective identity. At this critical time in re-imagining national identity in Burma, this project seeks to facilitate in the ‘unlearning’ of Rohingya identity currently fixed in contemporary representations and present a ‘potential history’ of the Rohingya within the collective memory of those in Burma and beyond.