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
I was excited to be part of a symposium in New York, Libraries in the Context of Capitalism, put on by the Metropolitan New York Library Council in their new digs on 11th avenue. It’s a nifty space where people can do things – have a meeting or workshop, use equipment to transfer older format media (VHS tapes, audio cassettes, etc.) to digital, or record a podcast. The Council also coordinates a number of programs among libraries and archives in the area. This symposium, the first of a series...
On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, as the old joke goes. But does anonymity truly exist on the web anymore? And when it’s taken from us, what else do we lose? So Sad Today talks about the value of anonymity for women and self-care. Jonathan Hirshon shares his personal battle to keep his face off Facebook. New Yorker cartoonists Peter Steiner and Kaamran Hafeez discuss the evolution of memes and digital anonymity, in dog years. And Alison Macrina and Morgan Taylor reveal what’s...
Britain, 1910. EM Forster published Howards End; Cora Crippen was murdered by her husband, sparking an international manhunt as he went on the run with his mistress; and the suffragettes felt the wrath of the home secretary, Winston Churchill, on “Black Friday”, as 300 women attempted to enter parliament to argue for their rights. After the ensuing riot, the government desperately attempted to cover up evidence of police brutality and serious physical assaults on the suffragettes, but the...
A brand new public tour that explores the rich and complex human rights history of the Métis people will launched on Louis Riel Day (February 19), free with admission at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR).The 75-minute tour takes visitors on a journey through many of the exhibits at the Museum related to Métis rights and includes activities and group discussion. It begins at the Ancestral Place Circle in the CMHR’s welcome hall and continues through the Indigenous Perspectives gallery...
Students in UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab used open sources to document the March 2017 chemical weapons strikes on Al-Lataminah, Syria—including a strike that appeared to have targeted a medical facility. The report Chemical Strikes on Al-Lataminah was issued on January 18.The Lab’s open source work—analyzing and verifying photos and videos found on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter—was conducted in collaboration with the Syrian Archive, a nonprofit organization that curates visual...
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH will be hosting events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
Events at the National Civil Rights Museum include two symposiums on April 2 and 3, followed by am all-day remembrance on April 4, and a Evening of Storytelling featuring civil rights icons and new movement makers also on April 4.
The MLK50 event at the National...
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...
