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Abstract:Although there has been much work published that assumes that independent community archives have an important impact on communities, little research has been done to empirically assess this impact. This research paper begins to fill in this gap by reporting on the results of a series of qualitative interviews with academic members of one ethnic community regarding their responses to one community archives. More specifically, this study reports on interviews conducted with South Asian American educators regarding their responses to the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), an independent nonprofit community-based organization that operates the websites www.saadigitalarchive.org. and www.firstdaysproject.org. The study reports on several emergent themes: the absence of or difficulty in accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA; the affective and ontological impact of discovering SAADA for the first time; the affective impact of SAADA on respondents' South Asian American students; and SAADA's ability to promote feelings of inclusion both within the South Asian American ethnic community and in the larger society. Together, these 1 The authors would like to thank Anne Gilliland, Ricardo Punzalan, and Gregory Leazer for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and all of the respondents for their participation.1 responses suggest the ways in which one community archives counters the symbolic annihilation of the community it serves, and instead produces feelings of what we term "representational belonging." The paper concludes by exploring the epistemological, ontological, and social levels of representational belonging.

This paper argues that archives play a significant role in fostering three elements essential to Cambodia's recovery: accountability, truth, and memory. First, archives have an enduring power to hold the regime accountable because they were the catalyst for an international human rights tribunal, as shown by the relentless activism of the archives' director, international efforts to preserve Khmer Rouge records, and the correlation between indictments and documentary evidence. Secondly, this paper posits that archives make a significant contribution to the establishment of truth because they have epistemological validity over the testimony of survivors, as seen repeatedly throughout the tribunal. Finally, this paper argues that the archives are succeeding in constructing memory of the Khmer Rouge era because it is forcing Cambodia to deal with its uncomfortable past by giving voice to survivors, creating textbooks, and conducting outreach. This paper is rooted in the field of archival studies within the discipline of library and information science, but draws on history, Cambodian studies, and legal studies. Employing transcripts of the ongoing tribunal, NGO reports, and newsletters as primary sources, the paper argues that while archives have been successful in holding the Khmer Rouge accountable, establishing truth, and creating memory, only a tribunal can administer justice.

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This special issue tackles critical approaches to archives and archival studies. Since the landmark 2002 Archival Science special issue on "archives, records, and power" edited by Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, there has been an explosion of efforts to examine the ways in which records and archives serve as tools for both oppression and liberation. This recent scholarship and some community-based archival initiatives critically interrogate the role of archives, records and archival actions and practices in bringing about or impeding social justice, in understanding and coming to terms with past wrongs or permitting continued silences, or in empowering historically or contemporarily marginalized and displaced communities. These efforts employ a range of methods (from grounded theory to action research to discourse analysis) and are informed by several approaches to critical theory, ranging from decolonization to postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, and deconstructionism. Notable topics in this arena explore the recordkeeping of oppressive regimes, examine evidence of genocide, racism and human rights violations, or trace the dynamics of postcolonialism and uneven distribution of power.2 By engaging these often painful, complex, and contentious 1

Community archives have compelled shifts in dominant archival management practices to reflect community agency and values. To analyse these shifts, we ask: In what ways do community archives and their staff challenge traditional archival modes of practice? Do community archives work within or against dominant frameworks for institutional sustainability? Do community archives challenge or replicate dominant custody practices? Based on semi-structured interviews with 17 founders, staff and volunteers at 12 Southern California community archives, this research examines the diverse models of practice utilised by community archives practitioners that diverge from and challenge standard practices in the field. By addressing these questions, our research uncovers a variety of models of practice employed by communities in Southern California to autonomously create and sustain their archives.

Abstract:This paper argues that the roles of individual and collective imaginings about the absent or unattainable archive and its contents should be explicitly acknowledged in both archival theory and practice. We propose two new terms: impossible archival imaginaries and imagined records. These concepts offer important affective counterbalances and sometimes resistance to dominant legal, bureaucratic, historical and forensic notions of evidence that so often fall short in explaining the capacity of records and archives to motivate, inspire, anger and traumatize. The paper begins with a reflection on how imagined records have surfaced in our own work related to human rights. It then reviews some of the ways in which the concept of the imaginary has been understood by scholarship in other fields. It considers how such interpretations might contribute epistemologically to the phenomenon of impossible archival imaginaries; and it provides examples of what we argue are impossible archival imaginaries at work. The paper moves on to examine specific cases and 'archival stories' involving imagined records and contemplate how they can function societally in ways similar to actual records because of the weight of their absence or because of their aspirational nature. Drawing upon threads that run through these cases, we propose definitions of both phenomena that not only augment the current descriptive, analytical and explicatory armaments of archival theory and practice but also open up the possibility of "returning" them (Ketelaar 2015a) as theoretical contributions to the fields from which the cases were drawn.