NPP/FAN Virtual Seminar Series – Archives and Social Justice 

The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) is hosted at the National Law School in Bengaluru, India. It is a small, physical, multimedia archive that chronicles queer histories and activism in the country. The founders of QAMRA recognised that memory was central to their project, for records of queerness were often few, or had little to say about loss. Based on QAMRA’s collections, this paper examines the relationship between memory and representation in the queer archive. It first discusses how postcolonial scholarship has attended to memory as reconstruction. Then, it reorients the discussion by placing the catalogue at the centre of the dialectic between the personal and the familial-public in queer lives, and considers the dilemma of representation in the queer archive. Finally, it argues for queer memory as a method in the classroom to address difficult feelings in a polarised public sphere. Moving beyond a discourse of care, queer memory addresses the line between responsibility and discontent, and responds to majoritarian approaches in India that dominate discussion on history and hurt.  

Ammel Sharon is Director, Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) Archival Project, National Law School of India University (NLSIU). 

Climate change is one of the biggest threats to material and non-material cultural heritage in the coming years, including archives and records. For that reason, archivists –especially in developed countries– have begun to identify archives in danger zones by rising-sea levels and encourage the international archival community to actively engage with this growing, avoidable issue. In the Latin American context, few studies have been performed despite international organizations –such as UNESCO and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)– have argued that climate change’s catastrophic effects will be more severe in this geographical region during the 21st century. 

To fill this gap, the aim of this presentation is to display a diagnosis on the level of awareness and disaster-preparedness on Climate Change in Latin American National Archives. For this, a survey was conducted to 16 archival institutions to inquire about current beliefs and actions about this phenomena. Additionally, six emergency plans were analyzed to evaluate their capacity of facing projected impacts by global warming. Finally, a set of recommendations will be offered to encourage archivists to create climate-focused plans and to mitigate possible negative effects on national archival heritage.

Claudio Ogass Bilbao is a PhD student on Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool and a master in History from the University of Chile. He is a member of the LUCAS (Lucas University Centre for Archive Studies) and the ICA Climate Change Working Group.

Mabel Tapia Ponce is master in history and candidate for master's degree in Cultural Heritage from the Catholic University of Chile, Regional Archivist at the Atacama Regional Archive of Chile and director of the Foundation for the Defence of the Neighborhood Heritage, Copiapó, Chile.

Francisco González Villanueva is a Geologist from the University of Chile and member of the environmental NGO Raudal. He volunteers with the Section on Archives and Human Rights of the International Council on Archives (SAHR–ICA). 

Oscar Zamora Flores is an alumnus from the New Professionals Program 2021-2022, a graduate student at Queens College, City University of New York and Assistant Archivist at the Bronx Community College Archives and Special Collections. 

In the past 100 days, the world has witnessed millions of photos, videos, text, audio, as well as social media posts on the tragedy unfolding in the Gaza Strip. One post showed a young teenage girl with an empty stare with the text underneath reading, “I no longer have a childhood.” For the Palestine-Israel conflict, these records of trauma will serve as the new body for future Human Rights collections. Like other records found in these collections, the stories will address one theme exceptionally well: pain.

Or maybe one day, she will catch a glimpse of a family photograph, a childhood drawing, a note from a friend or some other sort of record documenting her time in Palestine. Perhaps this young person through the use of these ordinary records will remember with fondness the days, months, and years prior to this disaster. One could argue that these records no longer exist only to be replaced with physically and digitally materialized memories of bombings, fleeing, starving, crying, fighting, and loss. But imagine for a moment that archivists could instead create collections that document the mundane and comparatively uneventful past prior to the disasters and destruction experienced during these moments of crisis. 

Itza A. Carbajal is pursuing a PhD in Information Science at the University of Washington Information School focusing on children and their records. In addition to pursuing her doctoral degree, she works as the Digital Collections Archivist at Loyola University New Orleans.  

Andrew Flinn and the British Community Archives and Heritage Group have popularized the concept of community archives, which has been criticized for the lack of definition of the very concept of 'community'. It is then surprising that the existence of linguistic communities, which is widely accepted in linguistics, has been totally ignored in these discussions, which never dealt with archives constituted for the documentation and identity of a linguistic community. This gap can be linked to a more general silence of archival theory on the role of language both in social justice and in the definition of core ideas in our field. We are oblivious to the constructed nature of archival terminologies, to their variability between languages, to the use of vernacular and polysemic English terms as if they were universal, to the arbitrariness of supposedly essential dichotomies such as 'fond/collection' or 'archives/manuscripts', and to the essentialist character of the very definition of ‘archives’. This deconstruction of community archives theory will show that the sympathy for the minority underdog is compatible with a blindness on how the international status of English stratifies archival practitioners.  

Rubèn Fernández, after twenty years as a language teacher, has gone back to college to earn an MA degree in archival science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has been a trainee at the European Central Bank and is interested in archival terminology and community archives.