The Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project (DAMC), at the University of Manitoba, is an interdisciplinary collaboration to design and develop three separate but related digital archives using a participatory archiving approach with stakeholder community groups. Working titles for these collections are the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database (MMIWD), the Sex Work Database (SWD), and the Post-Apology Residential School Database (PARSD). This article discusses research and development from the project's inception in 2012 through the end of 2014, reflecting on the practical and theoretical considerations that arise for researchers and practitioners in the information science professions as a result of engaging with anticolonial and antiviolence feminist methodologies. These methodological perspectives place the experiences and knowledge of Indigenous and sex worker communities at the center of decolonizing processes, foregrounding the need for archival processes that not only captures but also uses these knowledge(s) as the organizational scaffolding upon which to build socially just and representative archives for specific marginalized communities. Using examples drawn from all three archives, this article demonstrates how the goals, intentions, and knowledges of marginalized communities might be built into digital archives projects through a participatory archiving approach. This discussion is followed by an examination of how fostering and maintaining respectful relationships between all members involved with DAMC collaborations is fundamentally connected to both participatory archiving processes and broader social justice objectives.
This article examines challenges and barriers seemingly endemic to the research ethics review process. We argue that these challenges and barriers disempower community stakeholders in sex work research and that they put our studies and those who consent to participate in them at risk. To advance this position, we interrogate three of our own encounters with research ethics boards (REBs) in the context of current scholarship on meaningful collaborative research and REB roles and responsibilities in relation to sex work and other sensitive research. As these encounters illustrate, there is an urgent need for established REB processes to be opened up to allow for and respect non-academic expertise. We suggest that such policy and process revisions are particularly important given the growing requirement for meaningful stakeholder involvement in all aspects of studies that engage marginalized groups. In this new anti-oppressive collaborative framework, stakeholder community expertise thus informs study development and design, as well as the collection and analysis of data, and decisions regarding where and how study findings are to be shared. Research ethics review processes must be revised accordingly to acknowledge and give due consideration to community-based expertise. We conclude by proposing institutional and community-based strategies for resisting and revising current research ethics review structures and processes. Applying the lens of whore stigma to select REB encounters, this article contributes to existing research about ethical and anti-oppressive sex work research methods and methodologies, arguing that we must account for REB encounters in the growing body of theory that seeks to understand and articulate how best to conduct sex work research in partnership with sex workers.
The Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project (DAMC) is a research collaboration that uses digital information systems to highlight and interrogate the complex and related topics of colonialism in Canada, violence against indigenous women and girls, and sex work. This paper explores how the project's interdisciplinary theoretical framework and methodology influence the development of digital archives that embed community ontologies and epistemologies into their overall design, organization, and record appraisal and description, while also meeting broader project anti-violence and social justice objectives.
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database (MMIWD) is,at present, an activist archive comprised of thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous news reports relating to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-spirit (MMIWG2) persons in Canada. Through an exploration of the development of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database, including the development of our collections, our descriptive practices, and our participatory methods, this paper examines what it means for the MMIWD to engage in archival decolonization. It considers what kinds of (archival) interventions we can develop or employ to (re)frame MMIWG2-related mainstream news media reports. Perhaps most importantly it discusses the possibilities for this project to create something more than a counter-archive that reacts to colonial violence but does not itself provide or inspire decolonizing visions of a post-colonial political reality in which such violence is no longer a reality.
Including both academic and sex work activist community partners, panel members will discuss established and developing practices and key findings from the Sex Work Activist Histories Projects’ first two years as we collected and archived sex work activist histories. We draw from feminist and Indigenous frameworks of ethical, affective, and relational accountability (among groups, between academics and non-academics involved in the project, and between people and their records/histories) to productively consider how project relationships might be cultivated that are mutually accountable to the varied and complex analytical and affective positionalities of project members as they work together.
The Post-apology Residential School Database, or PARSD, is a collection of digital and digitized news media responses to and representations of Indian Residential Schools since the Canadian government's official apology in Parliament on June 11 th , 2008. In this conceptual paper, we discuss PARSD tagging practices, describing how our archival description approach is informed by feminist and anti-colonial theoretical frameworks and outlining how project members and 'guest taggers' describe, organize, and display PARSD records to promote decolonization. We conclude by considering both the potential and possible limitations that these practices may play in decolonizing and reconciling research.
Remix or bricolage is recognized as a primary mode of knowledge creation in contemporary digital culture. Archival arrangement represents a form of bricolage that archivists have been practicing for years. By organizing records according to provenance, archivists engage in knowledge creation. Archival theory holds that records are created as an output from social and bureaucratic processes. Archival description, then, could serve as a form of archival record, bearing evidence of the processes of archival arrangement. Current participatory and community-based approaches to archival description urgently require an evidential record of their processes of community consultation and professional mediation. This paper examines two Canadian community-based, participatory archival projects. Project Naming, at Library and Archives Canada, draws upon Inuit community contributions to augment the often sparse and sometimes offensive descriptions of historic photos of arctic peoples. The Sex Work Database at the University of Manitoba, works with sex work activists to create and apply a tagging folksonomy to a collection of websites, organizational records and news media. Analysis of these diverse, community-based projects reveals how current approaches to description make it difficult to distinguish between professional and community contributions to arrangement and description, and proposes ways to make such contributions more apparent.
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