The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory and The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archive invite you to celebrate the launch of The ArQuives’ Trans Collections Guide on December 3rd, 2020 – 4-6 pm EST. A roundtable discussion on the trans holdings of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archive, and the histories and futures of trans archival practices. Moderated by Elspeth Brown: Professor of History, University of Toronto; Director, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory; Co-President of the Board...
Canada convened a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) between 2008 and 2015, resulting in a national apology to Indigenous peoples and calls for systemic reforms, including education. The TRC sparked a national conversation bringing awareness, resources, and training opportunities to educators in Manitoba. While no such national efforts have taken place in the United States, educational reforms have been initiated at the state and municipal levels. Specific initiatives (exhibits...
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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 your submission by December 21, 2020.
Have...
Elections for the Human Rights Archives section have been extended to June 15. We have one open co-chair position, one web liaison/newsletter editor position, and some open steering committee positions.
This section, like most everything else in the world, is in transition from pre-2020 to whatever is coming next. Around the world, systems of power are being questioned and even directly challenged in ways that would have been hard to imagine just a couple years ago. The work of the HRA...
Among the most shocking images from the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill were pictures of a man wearing a sweatshirt that said “Camp Auschwitz” and “work brings freedom.” It’s an anti-Semitic reference to the Nazi concentration camp and extermination center where over 1 million Jewish people died or were murdered during the Holocaust.
The hoodie-wearer Robert Keith Packer was arrested in Virginia a week after the attack on Jan. 13. Two days later, at an emotional press conference, House...
The 5,500-page spending and relief bill that Congress passed Monday night includes the authorization of two Smithsonian museums — one focused on American Latinos, the other on American women — that pave the way for the world’s largest museum complex to become even more diverse.The omnibus bill calls on the Smithsonian to begin the lengthy process of creating the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum by giving the quasi-federal institution permission to...
This quasi-systematic review uses a critical disability framework to assess definitions of disability, use of critical disability approaches, and hierarchies of credibility in LIS research between 1978 and 2018. We present quantitative and qualitative findings about trends and gaps in the research, and discuss the importance of critical and justice-based frameworks for continued development of a liberatory LIS theory and practice.Read more here.
This podcast aims to bring the latest academic research on the Holocaust into the classroom. ‘Survivors’ is a conversation between Dr Rebecca Clifford of Swansea University and the Centre for Holocaust Education about her recent ground-breaking book ‘Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust.’Aimed at educators who are teaching about the Holocaust, it’s also fascinating for anyone just curious about the past and the intriguing stories of child survivors of the Holocaust. It explores...
To mark the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the ICRC Library is publishing a special issue of the IHL bibliography covering 10 years of international humanitarian law scholarship on the conflict. Unsurprisingly, the issue of accountability for violations of IHL features heavily in these publications. The diversity of issues covered, from foreign fighters to chemical weapons and cultural heritage, gives us a somewhat clinical picture of the Syrian tragedy.Read more ...
The bones of Black children who died in 1985 after their home was bombed by Philadelphia police in a confrontation with the Black liberation group which was raising them are being used as a “case study” in an online forensic anthropology course presented by an Ivy League professor.It has emerged that the physical remains of one, or possibly two, of the children who were killed in the aerial bombing of the Move organization in May 1985 have been guarded over the past 36 years in the...
As part of the Cura Continua: Art, Curating, and Practices of Radical Care series hosted by the Art and Archaeology Department at Princeton, keynote speakers Mari Carmen Ramírez and Yasmin Ramírez were invited to speak on the transformative role of archives in the belligerent safeguarding of Latinx art, culture, and authenticity in America.Both Y. Ramírez and M.C. Ramírez spoke about their professional work in archival preservation. At the forefront of their discussion was the argument that the...
In Professor Sheer Ganor’s course “History of the Holocaust,” students’ final projects were designed with three core goals: to highlight the spatial dimension of the Holocaust, to give students an opportunity to intimately learn individuals’ life stories, and to analyze primary sources and scholarly studies that shed further light on survivors’ stories.The students used StoryMaps, a digital platform intended for telling spatial stories. “[Story maps generally] use geography as a means of...
The Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Jakes Gerwel Foundation has signed a Memorandum of Understanding whereby the Foundation’s Centre of Memory will become the custodian of the Jakes Gerwel Archive. Prof Gerwel had a long association with Nelson Mandela and the Foundation.
He served as Director-General in the office of President Nelson Mandela, and as Mandela's Cabinet Secretary. When Madiba retired in 1999 and established the Nelson Mandela Foundation as his post-presidential office, Prof...
“The pandemic has been a horror,” says Rachel Mattson, Curator of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies. One of the projects that has kept the Tretter staff connected, supported, engaged — and able to support a wide range of research inquiries — throughout the pandemic is a project organized around a Twin Cities public access television show, GAZE-TV.GAZE-TV ran from 1986 until Pride season 1992, and then as Green And Yellow (GAY) TV until Pride...
Since the year 1999, I’ve been on a journey to discover a call that transcends political necessity and, instead, calls on our inner humanity. In my oral history of the Ambedkarite community, I have been able to explore the significance of one such clarion call, expressed by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar at the All India Depressed Classes conference in July 1942 in Nagpur, India. His call to his followers was: Educate, Agitate, Organize.Dr. Ambedkar believed that caste-based marginalization had led millions...
WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.
"The [Sisters of St. Anne's] remain unwilling to authorize disclosure of [its] records currently in the possession of the government of Canada," said Scott, in a statement to CBC News.
Several Catholic entities never turned over any records to the TRC. According to an internal TRC document obtained by CBC News, 17 Catholic entities failed to hand over any archival material to the commission.
"There are a lot of records in...
The agency added available historical records will be surveyed from federal repositories like the National Archives, the American Indian records repository and non-governmental organizations that operated Indian residential boarding schools.A final written report will be submitted to Haaland by April 1, 2022, and will be supervised by the office of the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs.“We must shed light on what happened at federal boarding schools,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary...
On May 27th, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the discovery of an unmarked burial site of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The Archives Association of Ontario (AAO) wishes to express our deepest condolences to the families of the victims, the survivors, and all Indigenous peoples impacted by the discovery. We recognize that the findings serve as yet another example of the atrocities committed and enabled by white settlers, their churches and...
Academics continuously loosen the concept of the archives in vigorous debate and flowery speech, while hundreds of linear feet of Black history are stacked in secure shelving, unbeknownst and inaccessible to implicated communities. “Why do we even have this?” is a recurring question whispered across institutions as complex histories of provenance and acquisitions lead to single box collections with titles like “Miscellaneous Slavery Documents,” a collection of Freedman’s Bureau papers and Bills...
Twenty-two years after the National Security Archive published the notorious “Death Squad Dossier” of Guatemala – which chronicled the kidnapping and disappearance of 183 people by government agents over a period from 1983-85 – police arrested 11 former military and security force officials on varying charges of forced disappearance, torture, rape, and assassination connected to the document.Read more here.
Given the use of social media by people living in areas of armed conflict or severe repression, social media platforms have become accidental and unstable archives for human rights content. The last two decades have witnessed a fundamental shift in how people around the world communicate. During this period, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media platforms have enabled increased identification, collection, and sharing of digital information related to international crimes...
Every Friday for the past nine weeks, artists and activists have been carrying on weekly rallies, assemblies and teach-ins in front of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Building on several years of earlier organizing work calling out the ties of board members at the Whitney Museum and MoMA to carceral violence, war and climate crisis, the Strike MoMA initiative was sparked early this year by revelations about the close association between museum chairman and private equity...
In March 2021, Lecturer-rank employees at the University of Michigan Libraries—specifically the Librarians, Archivists, and Curators (LAC)—voted to form a union as part of the University of Michigan’s Lecturers’ Employees Organization. This involved coordinating among the Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn campuses and setting standards and goals for all three work environments.
The members of SAA’s Issues and Advocacy section stand in solidarity with the union and, beyond signal boosting their...
Many archivists are reevaluating workflows and practices in order to create more equitable, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist metadata in their repositories. This important work is foregrounded by the Anti-Racist Description Resources, authored by the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia’s (A4BLiP) Anti-Racist Description Working Group.
Archives in Context spoke with A4BLiP’s Anti-Racist Description Working Group members Alexis A. Antracoli, Annalise Berdini, Faith Charlton, Valencia...
Institutional practices during the pandemic have undermined job stability in more subtle ways as well. In a survey by the Archival Workers Emergency Fund, respondents expressed concern about the elimination and consolidation of positions, reduction of contract lengths, inability to find new positions, and distribution of the impact along gendered and racial lines.Crowdsourced reporting in Google Docs and mutual aid requests further documents the systemic pattern of furloughs, forced retirements...
