All these conferences have sessions related to human rights and archives, and the HRA Blog needs YOU to write posts summarizing them. It's not as hard as it sounds, and it's a great way to ad a publication to your resume. Here are two examples of sessions covered at SAA 2017.
If you're interested in covering a session at these or other conferences, or if you have any questions, email hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com
On Tuesday, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Media Monitoring Africa and the Oslo Freedom Forum hosted a panel discussion and dialogue named “Media Under Fire”. The dialogue was part of ongoing work to engage with the media in South Africa. The event sought to explore new threats posed to the media, as well how journalists begin to self-censor when they find themselves under threat.
The panel included award-winning Angolan investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais, Palestinian blogger...
A prominent image of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will be featured on the new $10 bank note as a symbol of Canada's ongoing pursuit of rights and freedoms, the Bank of Canada revealed March 8.The front of the note displays a portrait of Viola Desmond, whose defiant stand against racial segregation is featured in an exhibit housed in the CMHR's Canadian Journeys gallery. An external façade of the CMHR, overlaid on an image of its glowing alabaster rampways, will be portrayed on...
Critical approaches to librarianship help us think about the ways that our work is fundamentally political and theoretical. These approaches firmly assert that social justice should be central goal and professional responsibility of librarianship and are used, therefore, to inform more inclusive policy, curriculum, and communication. As critical librarianship gains in popularity and visibility there is a growing demand for spaces where beginners can explore and unpack what it means to be ‘...
Apologies for the delay this month, but I had a busier than expected Easter/beginning of Passover. Hope you had a blessed Easter and a hearty chag sameach!
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or...
In the latest on our blog, Meg Hixon covers the panel on de-centering whiteness in archives at the Midwest Archives Conference in Chicago, IL. Read the post here.
There's more conference coverage coming very, very soon! If you're interested in covering a conference session, or writing about something else related to archives and human rights email hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com
The Home Office destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the UK, despite staff warnings that the move would make it harder to check the records of older Caribbean-born residents experiencing residency difficulties.
A former Home Office employee said the records, stored in the basement of a government tower block, were a vital resource for case workers when they were asked to find information about someone’s arrival date in the UK from the West...
The National Security Archive filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) against the CIA today in federal district court in Washington. The case seeks 12 specific cables from November and December 2002 that were authored or authorized by Gina Haspel, the acting director of the CIA as of this morning. The cables describe the torture of a CIA detainee under her supervision.The Archive filed a FOIA request with the CIA for the 12 cables on April 16, 2018. The Archive FOIA sought...
Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana said at the event held in front of the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg that with Madikizela-Mandela’s passing “we have gained an ancestor of active citizenship”. He said this after leading the gathering in observing a moment of silence for her.
Monday 9 April marks exactly 100 days to what would have been Mandela’s 100th birthday; and a week since Madikizela-Mandela passed away on 2 April after an illness.
The public event honoured and celebrated the life of...
This report describes our investigation into the global proliferation of Internet filtering systems manufactured by the Canadian company, Netsweeper, Inc. After undertaking a mapping of worldwide country installations, we focus in on ten country cases in which we verify that Netsweeper systems are being used to censor the Internet for subscribers of consumer Internet Service Providers, and where human rights and corporate social responsibility questions are acute.
Read more here.
The site where hundreds of men and women trained as volunteers to register African-Americans to vote in the 1960s has been designated a Freedom Station by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.In 1964, hundreds of volunteers, many of whom were white college students, trained in Oxford on the former Western College for Women campus before they traveled south to register black voters and set up freedom schools.Read more here. In related news, there is a new president at the Underground...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the May newsletter, please send you submission by May 24, 2018.
Since May, the US government had taken more than 2,300 kids away from their families as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' new "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which calls for criminally prosecuting all people entering the country illegally. Reports started surfacing of the ensuing chaos at the border; in one especially horrible case, a child was reportedly ripped from her mother's breast. As outrage grew, the question came up over and over again: Where were the children? Between...
In June 2017, Pride Toronto held its second annual “Pride Month.” More than 2.1 million people attended programming that spanned 25 days. Today, there are 45 sponsors listed on Pride Toronto’s Pride 2018 page, and it seems like the third annual instalment of Pride month in Toronto will be bigger than ever. Pride however has its roots, as we all know, in much humbler beginnings. To celebrate Pride month, we wanted to take a look at the very first Pride in Toronto: when was it? What was it? The...
Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery on June 19, 1865, presents an opportunity to highlight a rare resource at Columbia’s RBML in the Frederic Bancroft Papers. Bancroft’s notebooks include interviews he conducted with former slaves during trips he took to the South in the early 1900s. Bancroft recorded their answers to questions he asked about their experiences under slavery as well as many of his own observations about life in the Jim Crow South....
Reconciliation is rewriting Canada's memory banks as archivists across the country work to make their collections more open to and sensitive towards Indigenous people.
Library and Archives Canada is leading the way with a $12-million project to hire Aboriginal archivists to work in First Nations communities and to give more control over materials gathered there to the people who created them.
"Decolonization" is a hot topic among those charged with storing, organizing and making accessible the...
As an institution dedicated to the history of Brooklyn, we are proud of the rich fabric of multicultural heritage in Brooklyn. Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to uphold the government’s Muslim ban makes it even more imperative that we affirm our commitment to the histories of all Brooklynites. We want Brooklyn’s Muslim communities in particular to know that their stories, their struggles, and their contributions are embraced and deeply valued by the Brooklyn Historical Society.As part of our...
Libraries have long played a role in supporting marginalised groups, with refugees and other newcomers just one example of those who benefit from the access to information they provide. On World Refugee Day 2018, IFLA has put together a briefing, based on papers presented at World Library and Information Congresses and satellite meetings in recent years.
In particular, they fulfill a variety of roles for newcomers, as providing sanctuaries (safe spaces), storehouses (places to record their...
The Library of Congress subject headings have been examined in the past for their classification of subjects relating to race, gender, and sexuality. Overlooked is subject headings that relate to disabilities. In the course of creating records for the archival and object material that form the P.T. Barnum Digital Collection, the project discovered the imperfections of the Library of Congress subject headings, and the need to develop standards and protocols for the material.
This resulted in...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the July newsletter, please send you submission by July 24, 2018.
The HRA Section blog is very fortunate to have not one but two excellent posts this month. Tabitha Cary wrote about archives in Maryland collaborating to make the history of slavery more accessible online. This post summarized the MARAC Fall session "Promoting Transparency in the Legacy of Slavery" and can be read here.Itza Carbajal attended the Community Informatics Research Network conference in Prato, Italy and illuminated this innovative event. Topics included empowering communities through...
The UNICEF Internship Programme offers qualified and eligible students at both Headquarters (HQ) and Country Offices (CO) the unique opportunity to acquire direct practical experience in UNICEF's work and the United Nations system under the direct supervision of experienced UNICEF staff.To be considered for an internship with UNICEF, applicants must meet the following requirements:-Be enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate degree programme (or recent graduate);-Be proficient in English,...
After the 1915 Armenian Genocide, Krikor Guerguerian, a priest and genocide survivor, traveled the world collecting evidence to document the atrocities. Taner Akçam, the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Professor in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, recently collaborated with Turkish experts and graduate students on a digital repository that makes Guerguerian’s vast collection of incriminating...
The National Security Archive mourns the passing of Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alexeyeva, our dear friend, colleague and inspiration for all our work documenting human rights abuses globally. She passed away on December 8 at the age of 91.The self-described “Grandmother” of Russian human rights, Lyudmila Mikhailovna was a fearless opponent of authoritarianism in her homeland, facing the constant threat of retribution from her early days as a protestor and publisher of samizdat in the Soviet 1960s to...
The Museum of Black Civilisations opened on 6 December in Dakar to a flourish of dance, drums and acrobatics, and its curator, Senegalese Babacar Mbow, claims it "incomparable to anything in the world." Its 14,000 square metres of floor space and capacity for 18,000 exhibits puts it in league with the National Museum of African American History in Washington. Its range of exhibits is, however, more far-reaching. The high-ceilinged exhibition halls include Africa Now, showcasing contemporary...
