Antiviolence and Marginalized Communities: Knowledge Creation, Community Mobilization, and Social Justice through a Participatory Archiving Approach

Abstract

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.

"We come together as one...and hope for solidarity to live on"

“…Our work sits alongside this kind of justice-oriented work, which aims to promote the development of archives that are explicitly political and antiviolent [3,25], and that place important aspects of community, activism, and justice at their core [30,31,56]. Allard and Ferris have written about social justice and community mobilisation through participatory approaches to archiving in their Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project [3].…”

“…Our work sits alongside this kind of justice-oriented work, which aims to promote the development of archives that are explicitly political and antiviolent [3,25], and that place important aspects of community, activism, and justice at their core [30,31,56]. Allard and Ferris have written about social justice and community mobilisation through participatory approaches to archiving in their Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project [3]. Looking more specifically at one of the archives within this project, the Sex Work Database, we can see how they centre politics: "we make no claims to objectivity; we argue instead for the necessity of complicating dominant cultural representations of sex workers; for more effective alliances with and support for the efforts of those who struggle to establish sex workers as persons worthy of dignity and respect; and the elimination of whore stigma and colonial racism that underlie the symbolic and literal marginalization of and violence against sex workers" [25].…”

“…Looking more specifically at one of the archives within this project, the Sex Work Database, we can see how they centre politics: "we make no claims to objectivity; we argue instead for the necessity of complicating dominant cultural representations of sex workers; for more effective alliances with and support for the efforts of those who struggle to establish sex workers as persons worthy of dignity and respect; and the elimination of whore stigma and colonial racism that underlie the symbolic and literal marginalization of and violence against sex workers" [25]. They make clear that anti-stigma work is integral to the development of their archive, not only in their participatory approach to collecting and storing materials [3], but also how these materials are tagged and catalogued [25].…”

Canadian Health Libraries’ Responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action: A Literature Review and Content Analysis

“…The latter strategy was more effective at increasing recall than the first; though neither approach yielded many results in any of the searched databases. There have been a few scholarly articles published on the impact of the TRC on Canadian archival practices, especially with the establishment of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba [9][10][11], which archived the materials of the TRC, but very few sources show up for articles about the TRC relating to Canadian libraries, and health/medical library-specific sources are virtually non-existent. From this, the authors gathered that it might be too soon to expect many indexed articles assessing the impact of the TRC on health libraries in Canada.…”

More voice, less ventriloquism– exploring the relational dynamics in a participatory archive of mental health recovery

“…The postmodern renegotiation of the relationship between archives, knowledge and power and an increasing emphasis on the relations between the archival record, social justice and human rights has led to growing usage of participatory techniques by recordkeeping professionals and academics as a means of standing alongside marginalised individuals and communities and facilitating joint developments in archival practice and research 8 (e.g. Russell 2005;Faulkhead et al 2007;Allard and Ferris 2015;Evans et al 2015). At the same time, there is growing interest in exploring the social and relational aspects of recordkeeping alongside the systemic and structural, with a growing body of work approaching records and archives through an affective lens (Cifor and Gilliland 2016).…”