Courtney Dean, Candidate for Nominating Committee

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Courtney Dean

Interim Coordinator, Collection Management

she/her

 

I remain committed to SAA because I believe in the radical possibility of change.

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BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT

I am currently the Interim Coordinator for Collection Management and Head of the Center for Primary Research and Training (CFPRT) in UCLA Library Special Collections. Before UCLA, I worked as an archivist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and, as a graduate student, at the Wende Museum and the Pacifica Radio Archives. Prior to a career in archives, I spent almost a decade working in community mental health clinics both in Los Angeles and Oakland, California.

Over the last ten years, the bulk of my professional service has focused on advocating for and supporting archival workers. In 2014, as a recent MLIS grad, I cofounded the Los Angeles Archivists Collective (LAAC), a local professional group aimed at building a community of practice for students and newer professionals. I have also leveraged professional and autonomous working groups to advocate for more ethical approaches to employing project archivists: serving as vice-chair/chair/immediate past chair of SAA’s Issues and Advocacy Section (2017–2021); as one of the UCLA Six, recognized by the SAA Council for our advocacy efforts; as an appointed co-chair of the Society of California Archivists (SCA) Task-Force on Labor Issues (2019–2021); as a member of the autonomous Term Labor Best Practices Working Group (2020–2022), which developed a set of Best Practices for Archival Term Positions; and as part of the currently underway CLIR Pocket Burgundy project to expand and publish on this best practices work. Most recently, my colleague Angel Diaz and I published “'I Can’t Keep Doing This' Contingent Labor and its Impact on Archivists,” a chapter in ACRL’s Academic Librarian Burnout Causes and Responses.

Also central to my professional service has been serving on the Archival Workers Emergency Fund (AWE Fund) Organizing Committee, based on the concept of mutual aid, which was awarded an SAA Council Resolution for our work in August 2020. I continue to play a part in its next iteration, the Archival Workers Collective.

DIVERSITY STATEMENT

Each candidate prepared a diversity statement according to SAA guidelines.

As a white, cisgendered woman in a field overrepresented by white, cis women, I am acutely aware of the privileges that white supremacy affords and its detrimental effects on the composition of our profession, what and how we collect, our appraisal decisions, descriptive practices, and the narratives and audiences we choose to uplift, among many other touch points. While I think that diversity, equity, and inclusion work is a necessary starting place for many of our institutions and professional organizations, I’d encourage us to push further and actively work towards antiracism and other forms of decolonial and justice work, and not just through siloed committee work, as has been the solution offered by many workplaces, but by an active and intentional commitment in every facet of our professional work.

In my role as head of CFPRT, a program which works with graduate students from across UCLA on special collections projects, I actively seek out scholars who will bring perspectives and life experiences that challenge, reimagine, and activate our collections in new ways, oftentimes reading against the grain of the materials we steward and the professional practices we cling to. So much of reparative and justice work as a white person is knowing when to be quiet, to listen, and to allow others to take up space. I have been profoundly shaped, personally and professionally, by the many students I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside, mentoring, and learning from. Students have directly informed a host of projects that later went on to inspire wider departmental priorities including redescription, ethical collecting practices, anti-oppressive facilitation, accessibility audits, valuing labor, and bringing a critical lens to legacy institutional and professional practices. While I have also served on a library-wide committee as part of UCLA’s antiracism initiative, contributed to institutional ethical descriptive practices statements and best practices, and helped develop a community agreement to cultivate a safer space in our department, it has been through ground-up efforts and active engagement with those most often marginalized from our spaces that I’ve come to truly believe structural change is possible.

I constantly aim, with varying degrees of success, to use my positionality and institutional privileges and power to amplify and intervene and to do the work of calling my fellow white people in. Identifying candidates for SAA leadership positions is a significant responsibility. As the national organization that represents our profession, develops and maintains our professional standards, and signals to students, new professionals, and researchers what archives are and should be, SAA is often a signpost. Promoting and giving space to our BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ colleagues, to our colleagues with disabilities, to those working outside of academia, and others that may find themselves invariably excluded, should be paramount.

QUESTION POSED BY NOMINATING COMMITTEE

SAA depends on volunteers to lead the organization and guide activity in support of the strategic plan. Given the demands of our current social environment and need for work-life balance, what keeps you committed to SAA? Why should one volunteer?

CANDIDATE'S RESPONSE 

I am a firm believer in work-life balance, self care, and The Nap Ministry’s Tricia Hersey’s assertion that “rest is resistance.” As a primarily volunteer-run organization, things may not always happen at the pace we expect from our home institutions and people may need to step in and out of active service as their capacity and personal situations allow. This can and should be normalized more. However, it is also incumbent upon SAA members to acknowledge that this is our organization and that we have the agency to shape it in ways that fit our needs and support our vision for where we want to go as a profession.

As a new professional working as a lone arranger, I relied heavily on the documentation, listservs, and pockets of support that SAA offered. Joining SAA sections early in my career also afforded me leadership, facilitation, and community-building experience that I wasn’t necessarily getting on the job and connected me to a network of archivists across the country that I still rely heavily upon to this day.

I acknowledge that as an archivist at a major academic institution I am afforded the time, space, and institutional funding to participate in professional service work, something many archivists do not have. To that end I have been heartened to see in recent years efforts to lower barriers to access such as more inclusive membership fees, support of the AWE Fund, and hybrid conferences which help democratize participation.

I remain committed to SAA because I believe in the radical possibility of change, of leveraging our collective power to create the kind of professional organization that supports not only archives but archivists as our whole selves, and especially the most marginalized among us. I have seen firsthand how adhoc salary transparency advocacy efforts led to changes in job board requirements, how all of the data collection and amplification of experiences around precarious employment have informed Council’s recognition of the need for organizational support for archival workers’ labor needs, and how new sections have arisen to support not only our evolving work (Accessioning, Acquisitions, and Appraisal Section; User Experience Section) but also our members (Accessibility and Disability Section).

SAA has connected me to other archivists ready to do the deep work in dismantling white supremacy and systemic oppression in our profession, to those actively working to disrupt our professional involvement with policing, armed response, surveillance, and the prison industrial complex, and to those amplifying our professional contributions to the present climate crisis. Let’s get to work.

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