Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives

Caswell, Michelle

doi:10.1086/692299

Cited by 34 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Critical archival practices include ways to identify and dismantle white supremacy around description, appraisal, access or use, education, and professional life [33]. Other priorities involve including voices and stories of marginalized populations in archives, increasing accessibility of archival materials, deconstructing colonial archival terms (e.g., “collections” and “ownership”), rewriting offensive or racist description from the past, accessing digital cultural heritage materials according to cultural norms and instructions [34–36], and using a feminist ethic of radical empathy in archives or “a willingness to be affected, to be shaped by another’s experience, without blurring the lines between the self and the other” [37].…”

Section: How Can Health Sciences Libraries Apply Critical Librarianshmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical librarianship in health sciences libraries: an introduction

Barr‐Walker

Sharifi

2019

jmla

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The Medical Library Association recently announced its commitment to diversity and inclusion. While this is a positive start, critical librarianship takes the crucial concepts of diversity and inclusion one step further by advocating for social justice action and the dismantling of oppressive institutional structures, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Critical librarianship takes many forms but, at its root, is focused on interrogating and disrupting inequitable systems, including changing racist cataloging rules, creating student-driven information literacy instruction, supporting inclusive and ethical publishing models, and rejecting the notion of libraries as neutral spaces. This article presents examples of the application of critical practice in libraries as well as ideas for applying critical librarianship to the health sciences. This article has been approved for the Medical Library Association’s Independent Reading Program.

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Section: How Can Health Sciences Libraries Apply Critical Librarianshmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical librarianship in health sciences libraries: an introduction

Barr‐Walker

Sharifi

2019

jmla

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“…A variety of subdisciplines are also working to advance justice and decolonization, including critical information literacy (Saunders, 2017;Hathcock, 2017;Tewell, 2017; radical cataloging (Drabinski, 2013;Billey, Drabinski & Roberto, 2014;Dudley, 2017;Farnel et al, 2017), and activist and community-based archives (Caswell, 2017;Drake, 2017;Joseph, Crowe, & Mackey, 2017;Rolan, 2017; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, n.d.), and user experience (Harihareswara, 2015). In addressing questions of racialized power within libraries, Hudson (2017) argues that "to be included in a space is not necessarily to have agency within that space."…”

Section: Seeking Justice Through Participatory Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a More Just Library: Participatory Design with Native American Students

Young¹,

Brownotter²

2018

Preprint

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This article provides a brief history of Participatory Design and an overview of its principles, followed by a discussion of Participatory Design as an apt methodology for building a more justice-oriented library. To illustrate the practice of Participatory Design, the article includes an in-depth description of a Participatory Design case study in which Native American students and a librarian co-created a new community outreach tool for a library at mid-sized public research university. The article concludes with recommendations for library practitioners who wish to implement Participatory Design practices with Indigenous communities.2

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“…The following sections will provide concrete examples of efforts to decolonize postcustodial practices based on the experiences of the HRDI and IDEP. These examples will be examined through the lens of contributive justice and will extend the applicability of Caswell's (2017) that global south institutions possess deep expertise to contribute and that any collaborative project would fail without them at the forefront.…”

Section: Contributive Justice and The Global Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This article aims to contribute to critical archival studies discourse in two ways: 1) by introducing the concept of contributive justice to postcustodial praxis in order to situate postcustodial praxis within an explicitly social justice framework for 'the ultimate goal of transforming archival practice and society writ large' (Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand 2017: 2;Gomberg 2007); and 2) by using the concept of contributive justice to build upon Michelle Caswell's (2017) suggestions for dismantling white supremacy in US archives and expand upon their application in a transnational context in order to decolonize postcustodial collaborations between global north and south institutions. 2,3 I will apply contributive justice to postcustodial archival praxis and frame Caswell's suggestions in a transnational context by drawing upon my experiences leading transnational postcustodial collaborations in Rwanda and Central America for the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and in Cuba for the International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preservation is Political: Enacting Contributive Justice and Decolonizing Transnational Archival Collaborations

Sangwand¹

2018

KULA

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This article contributes to critical archival studies discourse and builds upon the theoretical and practical work accomplished under the postcustodial rubric in order to propose an archival framework that is explicitly oriented in the service of justice. Global north/south postcustodial collaborations highlight the ethical and practical obligation of adopting an archival framework that accounts for expanded notions of stewardship and narrative agency. As an archivist based in US academic libraries who works primarily on transnational archival collaborations in the global south, I want to introduce the concept of contributive justice to these postcustodial transnational collaborations because it reframes the role of the partner organization in the global south and acknowledges the agency of all partners (Gomberg 2007). By drawing upon my experiences facilitating transnational archival partnerships between US academic libraries and institutions in Cuba, El Salvador, and Rwanda, I build upon Michelle Caswell's (2017) suggested actions for dismantling white supremacy within US archives by offering concrete ways archivists can utilize a contributive justice framework to decolonize archival practices (i.e., appraisal, description, access) within transnational partnerships. By offering these examples, we can begin to both imagine and enact a more just and liberatory archival praxis. As Caswell states, 'through the lens of liberatory archival imaginaries, our work … does not end with the limits of our collection policies, but rather, it is an ongoing process of conceptualizing what we want the future to look like' (2014a: 51). The stakes are high in the shaping of our collective histories, and we all have the responsibility of envisioning and enacting liberatory archival futures.

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Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives

Cited by 34 publications

References 9 publications

Critical librarianship in health sciences libraries: an introduction

Critical librarianship in health sciences libraries: an introduction

Toward a More Just Library: Participatory Design with Native American Students

Preservation is Political: Enacting Contributive Justice and Decolonizing Transnational Archival Collaborations

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