Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies
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Dialogue: Shorish and Nowviskie
Get PDFThis dialogue offers perspectives from two differently-positioned library leaders on their collaborative work to advance equity and racial justice in the context of a predominantly white academic library and educational technology organization. Topics covered include issues of scale and temporality in reckoning with structural racism; developing a workplace culture that supports growth and learning while mitigating harm; building and sustaining community both within and beyond formal institutions; developing personal and organizational accountability; and challenges in the use of data for assessing progress and working authentically toward change.
Pre-print first published online 5/12/202
Radical Empathy in Peer Education: A Case Study on Deconstructing Whiteness
Get PDFSince 2015, I have provided a workshop on deconstructing whiteness through community narratives. Although the exercises, readings, and content changed to meet the needs of each host institution, all iterations of the workshop have aimed to build radical empathy through a combination of relational dialogue and storytelling. In this essay, I will recount the events and people who shaped this workshop over time, reflect on my experiences as an instructor and facilitator, and discuss various shortcomings of my approach.
Pre-print first published online 05/18/202
Radical Empathy in the Context of Suspended Grief: An Affective Web of Mutual Loss
Get PDFArchivists are inextricably bound to records creators, subjects, and donors not only through the work they do to ensure the preservation and access of these records, but through their affective relationships with each of these groups. Managing archival collections about grief, trauma, and death form part of many of career trajectories of practicing archivists, but we leave little space in the academic curriculum, and the profession, to acknowledge how this affects archival processes, workflows, and each other.
In this article, I would like to highlight a case-study about suspended grief, or grief experienced, witnessed, and re-lived throughout an archive, and the mutual or secondary grief archivists may experience when processing collections about traumatic events and experiences. The mutual grief experienced, witnessed, and re-lived by the subject, in this case, Argentine poet and human rights activist Juan Gelman; the donor, Gelman’s widow, Mara La Madrid; and my own, I argue, had a cathartic influence in the way I interacted with the donor, the subject, the materials, and the way they were described.
Pre-print first published online 02/01/202
Disgust and Fascination: Feminist Ethics of Care and the Ted Bundy Investigative Files
Get PDFContent warning: murder, sexual assault, corporal punishment
The King County Archives is home to records created by the King County Office of Public Safety and its successor agency, the Sheriff's Office. Among the records held by the King County Archives are police investigative files created during the disappearance and murder investigations of a number of young women killed in the 1970s. These files would colloquially become known as the “Ted Bundy collection” to both staff and researchers. This article, written from the perspective of a processing archivist working on the “Ted Bundy collection,” explores how emotionally challenging content may disturb typical archival operations like processing, describing, digitizing, and providing access to a collection. Utilizing a feminist ethics of care, this paper interrogates the act of balancing King County Archives' mandate for open government records while attempting to be sensitive toward the victims, victims’ families, and other survivors of that period of public anxiety, researchers of myriad intentions, as well as the collection's stewards. This article examines ways that the Archives has failed some of these stakeholders in attempting to protect others, including staff, and asks how to remedy this failure with iterative processing, description, and other work with the collection.
Pre-print first published online 12/14/202
Fierce Compassion and Reflexivity: Transforming Practice at the University of Melbourne Archives
Get PDFIn 2016, the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) commenced a program of change with regard to its records about child welfare in Victoria. This was driven by a social justice imperative to repair past harms done to Care Leavers (people who grew up in orphanages, children's homes, or foster care) while in out-of-home care, and for whom records play an integral role. UMA worked with Care Leavers, advocacy groups and support services to review their policies, procedures and practices around archival documentation and access arrangements. In this article, the authors explore those efforts through the prism of radical empathy (or rather a compassionate response to empathy) and analyze what was achieved and the challenges that remain.
Pre-print first published online 10/22/202
Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal
Get PDFThis article argues that feminist standpoint epistemologies help us rethink both the process by which archival value is determined and the archivists’ role in that process, leading towards a new methodology, epistemology, and political strategy for appraisal, which I call “feminist standpoint appraisal.” Feminist standpoint appraisal inverts dominant appraisal hierarchies that value records created by those in power to justify and consolidate their power at the expense of records created by the oppressed to document and resist their oppression and imagine liberation. As such, feminist standpoint appraisal explicitly and unapologetically gives epistemological weight (thereby assigning value to) records created and preserved by, and potentially activated in service to, those individuals and communities oppressed by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Furthermore, feminist standpoint appraisal shifts our thinking about the position of the archivist, from a purportedly objective “view from nowhere” (which in fact belies a dominant but unnamed white male position), towards a socially located, culturally situated agent who centers ways of being and knowing from the margins. In valuing the unique insights gleaned by people on the margins, feminist standpoint appraisal refuses the notion that archivists from oppressed communities must overcome their positionalities to meet institutional goals and professional demands for neutrality, but rather, values and leverages the insights gained from outsider status, viewing the attendant insights as assets, rather than as detriments, to the archival endeavor. Furthermore, feminist standpoint appraisal calls on archivists who inhabit dominant identities to acknowledge their oppressor standpoints and actively work to dismantle them.
Pre-print first published online 08/26/201
Does It Matter: Have BLM Protests Opened Spaces for Collective Action in LAMs?
Get PDFThe catalytic social justice events of the spring and summer of 2020 led to calls for a racial reckoning within society at large and also within the field of library and information science (LIS). This motivated us to capture the perceptions and voices of professionals across the field about changes they may have witnessed in their workplace, profession, and themselves. We consider the following questions: Have conversations, social spaces, teaching practices, policies, workplace dynamics, and demands, changed in response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, and if so, how? Have institutional changes perceived as responses to BLM protests been witnessed? What are the nuances behind such behavioral changes (e.g., opportunity, compulsion, peer pressure)?
For this research, we used Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to explore how the 2020 BLM protests impacted the workplace environments of LIS faculty and professionals in libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs). A 27-question survey was administered via Qualtrics and participants were recruited using LAM professional listservs. A total of 645 participants completed the survey. This research provides the preliminary analysis and discussion of those results and provides insights to the impact of the 2020 social justice movements in LAMs.
By capturing voices of LAM professionals, we explore participants’ perceptions of the impact that BLM protests had on their institutions and/or professional associations and document a range of responses at both the individual and structural levels.
Pre-print first published online 9/30/202
Negotiating Online Access: Perspectives on Ethical Issues in Digital Collections
Get PDFHow do we act as responsible stewards of archival collections in the digital realm, with a reflective eye toward issues of privacy, ethics, and cultural sensitivity; while working with technological infrastructures that tend not to share these priorities? What strategies can be used to work within and around the limitations of existing systems, especially in regard to the nuances of privacy and access, and to advocate for further development that treats these concerns as core requirements rather than special cases?
This article will provide practical considerations around the real-world work of building ethical digital collections. Framed as an asynchronous, semi-structured interview between two archivists working in academic libraries with digital collections management and culturally sensitive materials, we will draw examples from work with anthropological archives and academic-community archives partnerships. How do we do this work within our existing systems for digital asset management and aggregation, and how can we make them better?
Pre-print first published online 10/14/202
An Introduction to Radical Empathy in Archival Practice
Get PDFIn this editors' note, guest editors Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, and Holly Smith introduce the special issue on radical empathy in archival practice
Review of The Self as Subject: Autoethnographic Research into Identity, Culture, and Academic Librarianship
Get PDFReview of The Self as Subject: Autoethnographic Research into Identity, Culture, and Academic Librarianship by Anne-Marie Deitering, Robert Schroeder, and Richard Stoddart (2017).
Pre-print first published online 06/10/202