Katherine Crowe, Candidate for Council Member

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT

I have over 15 years of background and experience in both public and technical services related to archives and cultural heritage, all at my current institution, the University of Denver. In my first professional position, I oversaw archival processing, collection management, digitization, and digital collections management, as well as sharing our digital collections in a consortial digital repository. In 2012, I became the Curator of Special Collections and Archives. From 2012 on, I’ve overseen the acquisition and curation of Dance, Manuscript, and University Archives collections, as well as all instruction, reference, and outreach for my department, as well as teaching archives-related courses in our Library and Information Science Program. Over this time, my research has looked at gaps and silences in the historical record, whiteness and white supremacy in archives, exhibitions as archival outreach and in instruction, and critical pedagogy utilizing cultural heritage materials.

I’ve often joked that my choice of profession is due to a lack of original thought; both of my parents were librarians, one of whom was a senior administrator in academic libraries. My background has informed my choice in profession and given me insight into the nuances of academic archives in the context of higher education, it’s also been a catalyst to interrogate the aspects of academia and archival theory and practice that continue to be harmful. My day-to-day work is often intensely focused on the operational reality of my institution, and at the same time, I’m always looking for, to paraphrase Harsha Walia, the threads that I can pull in the interconnected places of the systems we work within to dismantle the parts that are harmful, working toward a more just, liberatory archival practice. That’s my horizon, where I try to re-orient myself to whenever I go off-course.

 DIVERSITY STATEMENT (Each candidate prepared a diversity statement according to SAA guidelines.)

The way I define and understand diversity, equity, and inclusion is that they are concepts that, in practice, are often in tension with one another. A diverse workplace may not be inclusive, an inclusive workplace may not be diverse, and neither diversity nor inclusivity ensures equity, which I would call the pillar of the “DEI” acronym.

A workplace and a profession should foreground its work, first, in dignity, respect, and acknowledgment of the full humanity of each of us, pairing that with an acknowledgement that we all contain multitudes and that it is disrespectful and tokenizing to make assumptions or judgments based solely on identities and backgrounds. I try to approach each new and evolving relationship with curiosity and humility, wanting to get to know the person in as whole of a sense as is appropriate given the context, and I apply that to my communication and leadership style in groups as well. I pair this approach with a hard boundary—I won’t engage in a debate of someone’s right to respect or dignity, even in an abstract sense. When no one’s humanity is negotiable, that can free us up as communities, professions, and organizations, to have hard conversations about not only what our stated norms and values are, but whether we’re living up to them.

In terms of my own work in this area, I’ve done a lot in community spaces centered on racial and social justice outside of libraries and archives. Three times in the past three years, I've co-facilitated a 10-week series entitled “Confronting White Supremacy,” which has white facilitators and has a curriculum developed by a community partner who is a queer Latina who spun it off a curriculum she had developed and facilitates for Latine communities to engage with racial justice. For the last 8 years, I’ve done community safety work supporting direct actions and protests led by communities of color in my area, which has included mentoring and training others doing this work, often in multiracial spaces.

I have a hard time answering what this work looks like within academia and my own institution because we have so far to go. I’ve been drawing upon Lorgia Garcia Peña’s Community as Rebellion to direct my work within the academy, because otherwise a lot of my efforts have felt more like harm reduction than movement toward systemic change.

QUESTION POSED BY NOMINATING COMMITTEE

Council members’ most important responsibility is to govern the Society thoughtfully and with an eye to the future of the profession, including supporting SAA’s financial stability and growth and developing and implementing the Society’s strategic priorities. Can you outline specific goals or initiatives you would prioritize during your term to address current and emerging needs and challenges facing the archival profession?

CANDIDATE'S RESPONSE 

One of my primary concerns is that cultural heritage work is sustainable from a variety of perspectives—financially, emotionally, ethically, etc.

To this end, I would advocate for SAA to work more closely with regional archives associations and vice versa; as a former president of our regional association, Society of American Archivists (SRMA), I saw directly the importance of regional community, as well as some of the disconnects from SAA, often in areas that are strategic priorities of SAA, such as continuing education. I believe that if SAA worked directly with and through regionals in a more systematic way, we would be able to provide more access to SAA programming (and funding for SAA through that programming) for a lot of archivists for whom national service or access to professional development at this level is not a realistic possibility given a lack of support at their respective organizations, unless it comes through their regional or state association. In working with and through regionals, we could also connect with archivists who would like to build their professional networks and provide perspectives of non-federal and non-academic archives which are sorely needed to properly represent the profession within our national association. I would argue that more intentional collaboration across areas of mission alignment between SAA and regional associations would enable us to better advocate collectively for ourselves as a field, as many of the issues faced by the regionals are faced by SAA, albeit at a much smaller scale, and almost always without any compensated employees.

As an adjunct professor for archival courses in Library and Information Science programs, as well as a supervisor of many graduate students and staff (many of whom are recent LIS graduates) in this field, I am also passionate about ensuring that we are properly preparing future cultural heritage professionals for the field, and that we are doing what we can to advocate for sustainable positions (in terms of workload, workplace culture, and continuity) and salaries. This field has no future if we are, as Maureen Callahan and Eira Tansey have so eloquently put it, “eating our young.”

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