In 1998, ’25 Lives: Out and Proud’ was planned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. The project, co-curated by Bruce Jones, CLGA president Edward Tompkins and vice-president Robin Brownlie, was originally conceived as ‘9 Lives: Canadian Lesbians and Gays and the Building of Our Community’, and grew to honour 25 members of LGBTQ communities. The initial inductees were chosen by a CLGA committee using three criteria: contribution to the growth of diverse out...
September saw not one, but two new additions to the Human Rights Archives Section blog.
Inclusive Processing of Indigenous Collections at SAA/COSA 2019Carli Lowe relates best practices for processing Indigenous collections in ways that are both culturally competent and engage the communities that created the materials.
Bringing Archives to the Communities They Serve: Three Takes from the Association of Canadian Archivists conferenceBlog editor Hilary Barlow covers 3 presentations about actively...
The National Native American Boarding School (NABS) Healing Coalition will discuss their initiative to identify and collect nationally dispersed Native American boarding school records and to implement digital access to these vital records. As part of a broader effort to provide access to and information about those affected by Native American boarding schools, the NABS digital archive brings together digital surrogates of historical documents held by individuals and institutions across the...
This is an investigation produced by the Sudanese Archive in collaboration with the Berkeley Human Rights Investigation Lab. It uses open-source tools and techniques to verify evidence gathered from videos, images, and/or reports published online. The focus of this report is about violence against protesters in Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman on June 30, 2019.
Protests in Sudan have continued for months as people fight for a civilian-led government. They have claimed the lives of hundreds....
Otrxs Fronterxs - Stories of migration, racism and (up) rooting - is the new exhibition organized by the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and the University Academy of Christian Humanism, in collaboration with the National Museum of Fine Arts.
The sample is presented as a critical and less conventional mapping on the migrant reality, emphasizing those darker and less fortunate areas of human reality that the migration experience brings.
The exhibition takes place in different areas inside...
For three years now, Asmaa Azaizeh has run a popular Arabic-language book festival in Haifa, a mixed city that has become a vibrant culinary and cultural capital for Palestinian citizens of Israel. But as this year’s festival opens on Friday, it is being held without hundreds of titles Ms. Azaizeh wanted to showcase. Israeli border officials barred them from being imported from Jordan, under an 80-year-old law that predates the existence of the state of Israel.
Arabic translations of...
Cell-phone hacks, internet monitoring, face-recognition cameras, predictive policing and biometric surveillance. Once the stuff of dystopian science fiction, these technological tools are increasingly used to violate human rights and supress dissent in countries around the world.
American investigative journalist Megha Rajagopalan was forced to leave China last year after probing state surveillance of ethnic Uighur Muslims of the Xinjiang region, with many sent to “political education camps”....
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, 2019.
L'Shana...
On Indigenous Peoples Day, the Human Rights Archives Section co-hosted a webinar with the Native American Archives Section about Native American boarding school records. If you couldn't make the event live, you can now view a recording via SAA's Online Learning Portal. Click here, log in, and "purchase" the recording (it's free and you won't be charged).
Thanks so much to National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the Native American Archives Section for working with us to...
The World Wide Web has had a profound impact on how we research and understand the past. The sheer amount of cultural information that is generated and, crucially, preserved every day in electronic form, presents exciting new opportunities for researchers. Much of this information is captured within web archives.
The project team invites archivists, researchers (from the humanities, social sciences, and beyond), librarians, computer scientists, and web archiving enthusiasts to join us over the...
Ni una menos (Not One Less) Chile and the programmatic line of memory and feminism of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights present the exhibition "Ni una menos Chile: Three years of struggle, resistance and rebellion."
This exhibition commemorates the three years of Ni Una menos Chile, a movement that began in response to the femicides that occurred in Argentina, and that in Chile has its beginning on October 19, the day on which it is convened, at the national level, to march against the...
From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for...
Archives are meant to hold the memory of Australia, but whose memory? The history these official archives preserve and tell is funded, collected, configured, curated, and often created by the colonial settler state. As such, they reflect the state’s values and ideology. This is the power that the archives wield: they can turn ideology into history, opinion into fact.
Archives are unreliable witnesses, especially here on these lands of invasion and occupation. As a collection of fragments of...
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson yesterday ordered the White House to preserve all records relating to meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders, as well as all records on White House practices and policies for creating and keeping such records.
The unexpected order came in response to the lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) together with the National Security Archive and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, filed in May...
On the 15th of October, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in collaboration with the Hanns Seidel Foundation and Breathe Films, hosted a dialogue titled “Mining Bodies” in line with its mandate to address poverty and inequality as well as to reckon with the past. The dialogue delved significantly into the lived conditions of mineworkers, mining communities and South Africa’s historical economic reliance on the mining industry. Preluding the conversation, the Mining Bodies exhibition was opened at...
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 November newsletter, please send you submission by November 22, 2019.
Happy...
As a fellow librarian, I’m here to warn you: ICE is in your library stacks. Whether directly or indirectly, some of the companies that sell your library research services also sell surveillance data to law enforcement, including ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Companies like Thomson Reuters and RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), are supplying billions of data points, bits of our personal information, updated in real time, to ICE’s surveillance program. Our data is being...
I spent the days after my meeting with the [Toronto Public Library] being attacked on social media by “gender critical” activists who called me a man, said I was ugly and called my speech “narcissistic” and “nuts.” The connection between the TPL’s decision and the emboldening of transphobic speech and attacks on trans women in public life seems to have been lost on most commentators, but it’s clear that the TPL’s actions have already resulted in significant harm to trans folks in Toronto and...
The Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala (AHPN) is in trouble. This unparalleled collection of Guatemalan police records, renowned throughout the hemisphere and across the world, limps along in a drastically reduced state.
A staff that once numbered in the hundreds has dwindled to 35 people, operating on temporary contracts that need to be renewed every couple of months. Guatemala’s government pledged to continue funding the AHPN but refused to accept international assistance...
Some of you may remember that I&A launched a survey earlier this year to gather preliminary data about the state of temporary labor in archives. We intended for this data to gird conversations about archival labor and to serve as one piece of a series of ongoing labor advocacy efforts across LAM professions.
Not surprisingly, many of the results supported current assumptions- archivists in precarious positions are for the most part anxious, stressed, and actively looking for work, even...
Two Charleston County sites with histories rooted in slavery have been accepted into an international coalition of places that connect the past and the present in thoughtful ways.
McLeod Plantation on James Island and the Caw Caw Interpretive Center in Ravenel, both operated by Charleston County Parks, are the first historic sites in South Carolina to be included in the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global network of historic sites, museums and memorials.
The Charleston...
For years, the New York Police Department illegally maintained a database containing the fingerprints of thousands of children charged as juvenile delinquents — in direct violation of state law mandating that police destroy these records after turning them over to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. When lawyers representing some of those youths discovered the violation, the police department dragged its feet, at first denying but eventually admitting that it was retaining prints...
A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal.
The anonymous whistleblower has posted a video on the social media platform Daily Motion that contains a document dump of hundreds of images of confidential files relating to Project Nightingale. The...
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 December newsletter, please send you submission by December 13, 2019.
For the occasion of International Human Rights Day, which falls on December 10th every year, I sat down with Chris Laico, Archivist at RBML, who along with Carrie Smith, is responsible for processing human rights related collections. I asked Chris a few questions about archives, human rights, his daily work, what keeps him up at night, and what keeps him going, and here is what he said.
Read the interview here.
