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.
272 million people around the world, according to the statistics of the International Organisation for Migration, are migrants. One in ten people in developed countries are foreign-born.
They are working to build new lives and livelihoods for themselves in other countries, often far from home, leaving behind danger, poverty or discrimination. With the effects of climate change, the phenomenon of displacement linked to extreme or changing weather patterns is set to become more and more common (...
In case you missed it, there is a new SAA section that may be of interest to HRA Section members. It's the Accessibility and Disability Section! The section statement is below and you can see the group page, including standing rules and other resources, here.
The hope for this section is that is it can be an inclusive community for people with disabilities and allies, where they can learn from each other, compile resources, and showcase work and collections promoting accessibility and...
Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP) is a loose association of archivists, librarians, and allied professionals in the Philadelphia region responding to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. The A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources project began as an initiative formed by various A4BLiP members in fall of 2017, specifically after a presentation they collaborated on at the 2017 SAA Liberated Archive forum with Teressa Raiford.
Teressa is a Portland-based...
Two weeks ago I met with a community leader whose own community was devastated by a genocide that happened decades ago in a place halfway around the world. We talked about how his community marks the event, the pain its survivors continue to experience and the challenge of getting his new neighbors to care about something so foreign to them. One of the things he mentioned struck a chord with me: “Recognition is about completing the fabric of our wider community.” To him, recognizing genocide...
Working with partners Nadia’s Initiative (NI), Un Ponte Per (UPP), and local stakeholder groups, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is currently developing plans for a museum and memorial that recognizes the atrocities committed against the Yazidi people in Iraq since 2014 and shares the larger history of the Yazidi community.
Content note: this post mentions abuse of children and sexual violence, including sexual slavery. Read the post in its entirety here.
Join us for a special event about the woman’s suffrage movement, challenges faced by early women leaders, and why suffrage still matters today. Explore the synergies of the suffrage and abolition movements as well as the many challenges faced by black women, who continue to struggle for both gender and racial equality. Speakers will include Dr Carol Lasser, Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, and Jen Miller.
The League of Women Voters of Ohio will also be providing free intersectional book reading lists and...
A new film by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will be screened in Montréal on Sunday about the work of the Rwandan-Canadian community to pursue justice against suspected war criminals identified in Canada after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
The short documentary film, created in partnership with the organization PAGE-Rwanda, looks at the surprising discovery in Canada of Léon Mugesera and Désiré Munyaneza – accused of crimes against humanity for inciting genocide and...
The second phase of the University Libraries’ Transgender Oral History Project has begun. Led by Myrl Beam, the project will feature interviews that highlight transgender social movements and organizing.
Beam, Oral Historian for the project — housed in the Libraries’ Tretter Collection — will build on the work of Andrea Jenkins, who interviewed almost 200 trans and gender non-conforming people as they narrated their life stories.
Beam is currently on a two-year scholarly leave from his role...
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 January newsletter, please send you submission by January 24, 2020.
Happy...
What worries you most about the state of the world now?
I worry about what I think is a real decline in the teaching of good history. History majors are down more than any other major. Humanities are already down compared to STEM, which I can understand — STEM is important. But I believe the humanities are incredibly important if we want to create an engaged, responsible citizenry.
I just thought about that word “humanity.”
Yeah. It’s the study of what it means to be human. Nazis didn’t fall...
This document is a set of guidelines for granting agencies, grant writers, and grant reviewers supporting the ethical creation of contingent positions in digital library work. We encourage granting agencies and grant reviewers to endorse and integrate these guidelines into application requirements, and urge institutions creating contingent positions to consult these guidelines when developing such positions.
Grants are opportunities to request and receive funding and other support that treats...
A national organization based in Minnesota is kicking off a new 10-year plan to bring attention to a dark chapter in U.S. history — and it’s just gotten the funding to put the plan into action.
Between 1869 and the 1960s, it’s estimated hundreds of thousands of Native American children across the country were removed from their families and sent to government boarding schools.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition formed in 2012 to seek justice and healing for those...
The Latino Museum Studies Program (LMSP) provides a national forum for graduate students to share, explore and discuss the representation and interpretation of Latino cultures in the context of the American experience. It provides a unique opportunity to meet and engage with Smithsonian professionals, scholars from renowned universities, and with leaders in the museum field.
Created in 1994 as Smithsonian Institute for Interpreting and Representing Latino Cultures (SIIRLC), LMSP seeks to...
MATTHEW CONNELLY: But in this case, it was fascinating, because what I found and what others have found is that records relating to the death, the sexual assault of undocumented immigrants had been designated as temporary. In other words, these were records they decided had to be deleted after sometimes three years, five years, 10 or, at most, 25 years, in this case.
So there was a big outcry. A lot of people — in fact, tens of thousands of people — spoke up in protest. Dozens of members of...
Building on the collaborative, community-engaged work of the American Philosophical Society’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), the APS Library & Museum launched The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) in 2016 to foster the development of the next generation of Indigenous and allied students and scholars.
As part of its NASI initiative, CNAIR will host a three-day conference in Philadelphia on September 24-26, 2020. The...
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the forced evacuation and relocation of all people in “military areas” who might pose a threat to national security. Since the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had occurred just months earlier, many believed that people of Japanese ancestry posed that threat, and the entire West Coast was deemed a military area.
Over the next six months, 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were taken...
On January 26, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved the sale of the 157,000 square foot National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Seattle facility, which holds permanent federal records for Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. This decision raises the question: which is more important, access to historic records or selling a public facility in a high-value real estate market? There has been fierce opposition from historical societies in Alaska and Seattle, historical...
This year will be the First International Meeting of Museums of Memory and Human Rights, which will take place in Santiago de Chile on November 12 and 13, organized in the context of our 10th Anniversary.
The meeting seeks to foster critical reflection and enhance the coordination of collaborative initiatives that highlight the role of these spaces with respect to the duty to remember that it is the responsibility of the states, and the right to memory that is characteristic of people, peoples...
On February 1, 2020, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience suspended the membership of the National Center for Historical Memory in Bogotá, Colombia, of its worldwide network of more than 275 historical sites, museums and initiatives of memory. To be clear, only the National Center for Historical Memory has been suspended; the Coalition continues to fully support its other Colombian members, including the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation, the Casa de la Memoria Museum...
The official exhibition, in Sandton City until July, begins with a series of large paintings by John Meyer, one of hills, presumably in the Eastern Cape, where three young boys are seen running through rays of sunshine and blades of tall grass. The entrance engulfs the viewer, enabling them to fully immerse themselves in what is about to be an excellently curated narrative of Nelson Mandela. The first gallery invites viewers to feel the power and emotion of one of the most dramatic and...
The archives of the Museum of Chinese in America may be in better shape than feared, after a five-alarm fire destroyed part of the Chinatown building where they were kept.
City workers began the process of recovering the museum's boxes from the building at 70 Mulberry Street on Wednesday. The archives, which boast 85,000 items of historical and cultural significance, were stored on the second floor of the five-story building, where a fire on January 24th destroyed the top floors and roof. Nine...
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 March newsletter, please send you submission by March 24, 2020.
