The Human Rights Archives Section aims to create a space for SAA members and other stakeholders (human rights advocates, scholars, government officials, and non-governmental organization workers) to increase dialogue and collaboration on issues related to the collection, preservation, disclosure, legal implications, and ethics of human rights documentation.
Login to your SAA profile to sign up for our listserv
Human Rights Archives Section Blog
Human Rights Archives Section Twitter
News & Announcements
The Nelson Mandela Foundation has acquired an archival document with great historical significance. Dating from the final stages of the Treason Trial (1956-1961), it is an open letter by the trialists to the people of Britain calling for support in their defence against the apartheid state’s charges of treason.
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.
Many archivists are reevaluating workflows and practices in order to create more equitable, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist metadata in their repositories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
