A researcher of visual history, Sela uncovers records of Palestinian existence and culture hidden in Israeli archives.Rona Sela, a researcher of visual history and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, first began studying the history and culture of Zionist and Israeli photography more than 20 years ago.
Read more here.
Who is this Guide for?
You are a human rights activist, a small or grassroots human rights organization, or media collective;
You are creating or collecting digital video to document human rights abuses or issues, and;
You want to make sure that the video documentation you have created or collected can be used for advocacy, as evidence , for education or historical memory – not just now but into the future….
But you are not sure where to begin, or you are stuck on a particular problem.
If...
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 September newsletter, please send you submission by September 22, 2017.
Syria's civil war has been one of the modern world's most brutal conflicts and one of its most heavily filmed. Hundreds of thousands of amateur videos uploaded to YouTube document every heartbeat of the war over the past seven years, from momentous events like cities under bombardment to intimate scenes like a father cradling his dead children.Syrian activists fear all that history could be erased as YouTube moves to rein in violent content. In the past few months, the online video giant has...
When the latest barrage of bad news out of Washington batters your hope for the future, it’s time to plan a trip to Interference Archive in Brooklyn.This place is the Smithsonian of dissent, the Louvre of political organizing—a vast treasure of pamphlets, posters, banners, flyers, photos, buttons, film clips, newspapers, t-shirts, ‘zines, audio recordings and other artifacts from movements that changed the world.You’ll find troves of boxes, files, stacks and shelves shining light on anti-...
Archival work requires an ethics of care for the deeply personal and the deeply political. My former boss at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics often said that all art is political. The same can be said about archives and archival work. Record creation, keeping, obstruction, or misrepresentation are all acts of identity and power. Who gets to be remembered and historicized by way of record creation? Who is forgotten or purposefully silenced in history by way of omission or...
France's top constitutional authority says presidential archives on Rwanda should remain secret, thwarting a genocide researcher.
In 1994 France backed Rwanda's ethnic Hutu leaders at the time of the genocide by Hutu militias. Some 800,000 people - mostly Tutsis - were killed.
The Constitutional Council says a 25-year block on ex-president François Mitterrand's documents is legitimate.
A researcher, François Graner, had sought permission to study them.
Read more here.
Forty-four years after the U.S.-supported military coup, the Santiago Museum of Memory and Human Rights has inaugurated a special exhibit of declassified CIA, FBI, Defense Department and White house records on the U.S. role in Chile and the Pinochet dictatorship. The unusual exhibit, which officially opened to the public on September 5, is titled Secretos de Estado: La Historia Desclasificada de la Dictadura Chilena—Secrets of State: the Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship.Curated...
In 1989 Redstockings established the Archives for Action to make the formative and radical 1960s experience of the movement more widely available. Below, Annie Tummino (organizer and archivist) and Carol Giardina (organizer and historian) reflect upon how the archives have contributed to their feminist work.
Read more of this article here. Read more of Acid Free, a quarterly publication of the Los Angeles Archivists Collective, here.
The Octavius V. Catto Memorial Fund was created in 2004 and among his champions is Mayor Jim Kenney, who has been determined to memorialize the South Philadelphia scholar, educator, and athlete. Born in 1839, Octavius V. Catto’s many accomplishments include the successful desegregation of horse-drawn street cars in Pennsylvania, the recruitment of Black soldiers for the Civil War and a get out the vote effort that had black men waiting in line at the polls to cast their ballot on Election Day...
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was officially appointed chancellor of Germany. His rise to power ushered in Nazi control of the country and led to the horrors of the Holocaust. Among those targeted by the Third Reich were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. LGBTQ people would be sent to concentration camps alongside Jews, the disabled, and many more — but one of the Nazis's first shows of force against Germany’s LGBTQ community was an attack on information.
On May 6, 1933...
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 October newsletter, please send you submission by October 24, 2017.
“There is an arc of history that is very dramatic when you put these documents together,” said Peter Kornbluh, the exhibition’s curator who is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington and director of its Chile Documentation Project. “They have provided revelations and made headlines, they have been used as evidence in human rights prosecutions, and now they are contributing to the verdict of history.”On view are documents revealing secret exchanges about how to prevent...
In April 2015, Aaron Bryant rushed to be there when demonstrations swept through Baltimore on the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral. He filmed protesters angered by Mr. Gray’s death throwing rocks, watched the helicopters overhead and listened to marchers singing hymns.But Mr. Bryant was neither a police officer nor a participant in the protest. He was a curator for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, there to collect artifacts, testimony and footage as the events unfolded...
Is there an issue that really irks you and you have something to say? Is there something in the news that can benefit from an archival perspective? Did you work on an incredible project related to archives and human rights and you want to share you insights? See a conference session or other event related to archives and human rights that you'd like to cover?Send blog post pitches to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. Include a short summary of your idea and why you're the best person to write it....
There’s growing acknowledgement that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities have been “researched to death” since the early days of colonisation, yet given little control over or access to data that is collected.The emerging Indigenous data sovereignty movement asserts that Indigenous peoples across the globe have inherent and inalienable rights relating to the collection, ownership and application of data about them and their lands and lives.Read more here.
If Canada is truly multicultural, why are images of the immigrant experience missing from our official archives? When Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn searched through the records at the National Film Board, the CBC, and Libraries and Archives Canada, she saw a striking lack of diversity in the images she found.
"To my great disappointment, it was really difficult to find forms of representation, but more importantly to see how multiculturalism could have changed over time," she says.
Read more here.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that thousands of sensitive records pertaining to abuses at Indigenous residential schools are confidential and should be destroyed.
In a unanimous decision released Friday, the top court said the collection of accounts for independent compensation assessment was meant to be a "confidential and private process" and that "claimants and alleged perpetrators relied on the confidentiality assurance."
Read more here.
While the Agency deserves credit for compiling a basic guide to searching their FOIA reading room, it still omits information or leaves it spread out across the Agency’s website. In one egregious example, the CIA guide to searching the records lists only three content types that users can search for, a review of the metadata compiled by Data.World reveals an addition ninety content types. This guide will tell you everything you need to know to dive into CREST and start searching like a pro....
“We will put special emphasis on new leads,” said the retired special agent, Vince Pankoke, 59, who is leading the effort. “We need to verify stories as they come in, and we know that is going to lead to further investigation.”
In the search for new leads, he and his team are digitally combing through millions of pages of scanned material from the National Archives in Washington as well as archives in the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.
Read more here.
Not sure why the NYT and CBC were so full of archival news this month. 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...
Our latest at the Human Rights Archives Section blog examines the challenges and rewards of curating an archival collection documenting capital punishment in the United States. The post summarizes presentations from the University at Albany's National Death Penalty Archive at the Fall 2017 Mid-Atlantic Region Archives Conference.
Content note: this post contains references to execution, violent death, rape, harm to children and racism in the justice system.
Read it here.
How are collections processed and presented regarding race and ethnicity? What is not collected and why? Who gets to say what is worth collecting? Operating from three distinct but interlocking perspectives, the authors will discuss their experiences navigating collection development and collection development policies as a Black woman archivist, a White woman anti-racist public librarian, and a Black woman academic librarian. The authors will look at the ways in which Black women as...
Is there an issue that really irks you and you have something to say? Is there something in the news that can benefit from an archival perspective? Did you work on an incredible project related to archives and human rights and you want to share you insights? See a conference session or other event related to archives and human rights that you'd like to cover?Send blog post pitches to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. Include a short summary of your idea and why you're the best person to write it....
[T]he presentations I attended during the Oral History Association’s 2017 annual meeting delivered critical historical narratives and resources that can help us to further challenge some of the nationalist myths that obscure the experiences and perspectives of various marginalized communities in American history. These presentations helped to illuminate important lessons we can learn from an engagement with the histories and contemporary concerns of marginalized peoples in the US. In honor of...
