More than a “Slap in the Face”: ICA’s Congress in Abu Dhabi Whitewashes the UAE’s Reality

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from Burkely Hermann, Metadata Librarian for the National Security Archive and current I&A Blog Coordinator. This post does not represent the views or positions of the Issues & Advocacy committee or National Security Archive. The views expressed here are the views of Mr. Hermann, and are not the views of any other individuals or organizations.

Promotional image on the official website for the ICA’s Congress, screenshotted on Aug. 15, 2023, trying to legitimize their presence in the UAE. I re-examined the page before publishing this article and the numbers were the same.

Recently, there has been a hullabaloo on social media about the location of The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)’s World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) in 2024. Set to occur in Dubai, the most-populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and capital of the Dubai Emirate, it was panned on social media as willfully ignorant, divisive, disappointing, embarrassing, spineless, craven, shameful, disgusting, disregarding queer librarians, driven by money, and resulting in a conference attended by “mostly bigots and…centrists.” Others criticized it as undemocratic, since the IFLA’s own press release showed majority opposition among those voting on the resolution, especially those from “Europe, North America…Latin America and the Caribbean”. Some proposed that the conference could be held any other location in the region that wasn’t hostile and “outwardly dangerous…to human rights,” stated they would not join the IFLA as a result, called for a boycott on the conference, or fumed that the decision was being blamed by the IFLA on members from “Asia-Oceania, the Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.” It appeared there were a small number in favor, who seemed excited that IFLA’s conference was coming to their country, but it is not known how representative that is, as such individuals appear to be outliers. [1]

What is not talked about as much is the congress/conference of the International Council on Archives (ICA) in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, set for October 9 to October 13. Official materials call it a “unique chance” to network with fellow archivists and a place to promote the “best examples” of achievement in archival and records management. The ICA claims it will be somewhere where archivists can connect with professionals across the world to build networks to empower our “knowledge societies,” all under the “hospitality of Abu Dhabi.” Considering the response to the IFLA conference, I have to ask whether the ICA conference is, rather than being some networking opportunity, a slap in the face for queer people and unsafe for those people? It is an indication of the non-neutrality of archives and un-representative nature of the ICA? Should the conference, due to its location, be boycotted? [2] In this post, I’ll answer those questions and explain why the ICA’s reasoning is flawed, and talk about the deeper problems with this conference, which go beyond the conference taking place somewhere that is hostile to queer people.

Much of the opposition to the IFLA’s conference appeared to center around lack of rights in the UAE for queer people, more than any other reason. There was some mention of how the location went against the IFLA’s own values. Some called for a new location in a “developing country”. There are further problems with the ICA’s choice of Abu Dhabi as the conference location. It’s not the focus on climate change, sustainability, accessibility (of information), memory work, peace, and tolerance, nor even the theme of enriching “knowledge societies,” which are welcome. Rather it is that the conference is tied directly to the UAE’s government. One speaker, Abdulla Majed Al-Ali, currently Director General of the UAE’s National Library and Archives, formerly worked for Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism. He also worked in the country’s armed forces. Another speaker, Dr. Abdullah Al Raisi, chair of the ICA’s conference organizing committee, was formerly director general of that archives. That institution has a message from the UAE’s Vice President, Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the deputy head of state of the entire country, on its website. The archives declares that safeguarding documents is an important responsibility of a “sovereign, enlightened state,” notes the importance of improved archiving to preserve the nation’s history, and states that this archives will reinforce the concept of “institutionalization and enhance[d] national identity.” [3]

That isn’t all. The UAE’s National Library and Archives is directly involved in fostering nationalism, instilling loyalty, values, and virtues of the UAE’s founder, Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and “enhancing national identity.” Other pages state that the archives aims to enhance civic spirit. One individual working there even did public relations for Dubai’s Crown Prince. This goes beyond the archives’ objective to preserve the country’s history, duties, and agreements/partnerships/memberships in various international organizations. The institution’s approach appears to be very nationalistic. It is reinforced in part by having the National Records & Archives Authority, which focuses on preserving the “antique history” of Oman in an effort to “build a brighter future,” as an exhibitor and even more by having the Abu Dhabi Convention and Exhibition Bureau as a conference sponsor. The latter is an issue primarily because the Bureau aims to champion the Abu Dhabi Emirate, one of the country’s seven emirates (all are in a constitutional federation), as a “dynamic global business events leader.”  [4]

Surely, like the IFLA’s executives, some from ICA will defend this location choice. They may point to exhibitors such as non-profits like Al Ghadeer Emirati Crafts, or companies like Rookie Ninja, Phase One Photo, Clarivate, and Artefactual. They might point out that the Emirates News Agency is wholeheartedly supporting the conference, note that participants would join a “global community of archivists and industry professionals,” or note that you can visit interesting local sites (there is even a special program for one’s spouse or partner). These executives could says the country as tourist-friendly and “world-renowned for its social and modern environment.” They might declare that the conference can be a great business opportunity to reach a global audience, point to the expansive program with many topics and sessions, the conference’s sub-themes, or other features.

All of this ignores the fact that FamilySearch, a genealogical arm of the Mormons, uses prison labor to index records, as I’ve previously written about on this blog is a sponsor. Xerox, EXPM, Artefactual, NVSSoft, Zeutschel, and Nirvana Travel and Tourism are sponsors as well. Also, former French President Francois Hollande is a keynote speaker. [5] On the one hand, he supported the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption for LGBTQ+ couples, which passed the French National Assembly in 2013. On the other, he strongly supported the U.S.-backed Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, which began in March 2015, and militarily intervened in a former French colony, Mali, from January 2013 to July 2014, obstinately to fight Islamic extremism, but also to protect “French interests” in the country, with a continued French military operation until November 2022. [6]

This conference is nothing to look forward to (as Preservica declared), praise, be grateful for, or treat it like just another conference, which was decided upon by the ICA sometime before November 2022. Is it possible to experience “Arabian hospitality” or “discover new horizons” in a country hosting this “cultural heritage” event which is strongly supported by UAE Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan? [7] This conference is clearly positioned to promote the UAE, whitewashing its problematic elements. The U.S. State Department’s latest human rights report, not an unbiased source by any measure, on the country, cites “credible reports” of arbitrary detention and arrest, privacy invasions, media and free expression restrictions, internet freedom limits, unfair and unfree elections, curtailed political participation, criminalization of same-sex consensual actions between adults, and prohibition on independent trade unions. This conference will, without a doubt, boost the country’s role as a regional “trade and investment hub,” support the country’s desire to attract additional foreign direct investment, and push to shift the country’s economy to a so-called “knowledge economy” in the next ten years. [8]

This screenshot from a video on the official YouTube channel for the conference (mostly has Arabic-language videos), from February 2020, shows that planning for the conference there began at that time, if not earlier than that.

Ultimately, the ICA is shilling for the government of UAE. Its assessment of the UAE is no better than the country’s self-submitted Universal Periodic Review reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council. The official site for the conference boasts that the UAE is “ideal tourist destination,” declares that women have equal rights to men, and calls for modest dressing, especially in religious areas, and recommends visitors respect the “Muslim values of the local community.” While some of this makes sense, the description misrepresents the UAE as a rosy place. It boggles the mind that any of the other 21 Arab states, or any other states in Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, or North Africa, were not chosen as a conference location instead. [9]

There is only one response to this decision by the ICA: to boycott the conference in Abu Dhabi and encourage sponsors, like Preservica, to pull out. This call is not Arabphobic, Islamophobic, nor does it engage in what some call “homonationalism“. Many governments in the Middle East have laws infringing upon LGBTQ+ rights, either due to religious conservative governments and/or holdover laws from colonial control. In the case of the UAE, although it was under British control between 1820 to 1971, the Arab rulers were nominally independent. They could “keep the peace,” with arbitration of disputes through the British, to abstain from relations with other European countries, while the British committed to providing the rulers, and their governments, with protection against any “unprovoked foreign aggression,” but did not interfere within the countries. This ended when the United Arab Emirates was formed in December 1971, ending the unofficial British colonies in the Persian Gulf region. [10]

As such, the homophobic laws of the UAE do not have roots in colonialism, but in the country’s legislative history. They include capital punishment for male-male and female-female sexual intercourse, punishments for sex “outside marriage” and cross-dressing, while gender reassignment surgery appears to be illegal (or hard to obtain). This “conservative” and regional hub for tourism reportedly allows lesbian or gay relationships under decriminalization of cohabitation by unmarried couples, in 2021. It is not known whether this is enforced evenly or if such relationships are socially accepted by residents. Previously, it has been reported that the country’s authorities investigated a children’s magazine which depicted a “multi-coloured character” with claims that it promoted homosexuality, resulting in its retraction. The UAE also refused to air Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (possibly because some saw Gwen Stacy as trans) in the country or films like Lightyear (for a kiss between lesbian characters). [11]

Even Arab countries like Bahrain, Djibouti, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria have better legal strictures toward queer people than UAE, even though they still are restrictive. The conference’s current location in Abu Dhabi runs afoul of the ICA’s own mission stating that archives are fundamental to “identity, democracy, accountability and good governance.” How is accountability and democracy possible when the conference is a vehicle for the country’s government to promote its interests? Will any criticism of the government be allowed? Or will it be discouraged to not annoy and anger the government? Will any topics about LGBTQ+ sessions be allowed? The IFLA said that the latter was not possible and admitted that homosexuality is not recognized by the UAE constitution “and therefore illegal.” [12] A well thought-out thread on X/Twitter by Naomi House opposing the location of the IFLA’s conference in Dubai argued that conferences need to be inclusive (already in-person conferences exclude many in the library field from participating) of all members, stated that this location has laws endangering many with “encoded legal bigotry,” and called for online conferences which are safe for all groups and members. The same logic can be applied to this ICA conference.

Considering that the ICA has invested time, and money, into this conference, its sponsors, and location, it is extremely unlikely it will be reversed. The fact that the conference is in the UAE is indicative that the values of the ICA do not matter when money, prestige, and influence win out over common sense. Whether “true universality and inclusiveness” can exist isn’t the issue, but rather that sets a bad precedent that only countries like the UAE “can afford to host.” It may hint at “institutional homophobia” of the ICA, and a stance against inclusion and diversity, all of which was said in opposition to the IFLA’s decision. Those in favor of this choice will declare that it will foster community spirit between archivists across the world, claim it will be “unforgettable,” joyful, or even say that the conference will enrich the “UAE’s society and the fields of documentation and archiving.” [13] Having the conference in the UAE will weaken any (likely underground) efforts, by those on the ground, to improve lives for LGBTQ+ people within the country, by legitimizing the country’s laws, hurting any possibility of change.

Some months ago, a LinkedIn message from Sara, the Marketing Director for the conference, strangely extended a special invitation through a LinkedIn message to the National Security Archive (NSA), even though I’m not a manager there. She declared that NSA has widely recognized expertise, advancing historical research, and promoting transparency. She tried to convince me by saying that discussions at the conference would be enriched by NSA’s participation, claiming that the event would be influential, exceptional, and highly anticipated, and make history as taking place in the “Middle East for the first time ever.” [14] This marketing effort could be why a search for the words “ica abu dhabi” is dominated by tweets from the official account on X/Twitter for the conference, and very few responses from anyone else. Recent tweets make this clear. One tweet only a couple days ago from Piql claiming that the conference will be the “world’s biggest archiving event.”

All these arguments ignore the unsustainable nature of the UAE. A supermajority of the country’s energy comes from petroleum, coal, and natural gas, and only a small sliver coming from solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the International Energy Agency. The Energy Information Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, adds that the country is energy-intensive since it is one of the largest petroleum producers in the world. Their assessment states that the UAE economy is fueled largely by “natural gas…petroleum and other liquids.” Hosting the conference in the UAE stands against at least four of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, [15] which the IFLA claimed they followed. It is also why some have argued that the hosting of the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (also known as COP-28) in the UAE from November 30 to December 12 of this year is a form of greenwashing. The country hired PR companies to promote itself as the COP-28 head, pay users to clean the Wikipedia page of the COP-28 president (Sultan Al Jaber), run promotional campaigns on social platforms, polish its “green credentials,” and preparation of a list covering “touchy and sensitive issues”. [16]

Those supporting Abu Dhabi as the conference location may echo arguments of library associations in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and elsewhere in the region which supported Dubai as the IFLA conference location. They supported the decision as a positive opportunity for Arab librarians and libraries, and for other reasons. As such, it makes sense there is positive sentiment by those individuals and groups toward this conference. Furthermore, there is value in standing against “historical biases towards Western countries” when choosing conference locations. [17] However, hosting the conference in the UAE makes it unlikely there would be open exchange of ideas, especially due to human rights violations, including about migrant workers and other individuals, within the country. In addition, the choice of Abu Dhabi by the ICA and Dubai by the IFLA stands against established principles of each organization. Both serve as promotional opportunities for the UAE. They whitewash the country’s reality.

The conference’s location in the UAE is interlinked with discussions about colonialism, Western imposition of values onto other parts of the world, and racism, at minimum. While archivists obviously cannot address this in one fell swoop, there is something that can be done at the present: boycotting both conferences. This should be accompanied with advocacy for a safer and more inclusive virtual/online conference. It could avoid librarians, or archivists, fighting among one other over a conference location, where nationalism comes to the fore, especially the case with the division between those opposing or supporting the IFLA conference’s location. Archivists should express these views on social media and directly to the ICA and IFLA management.

Dr Abdulla Alraisi (left), Cultural Adviser of the UAE Presidential Court and Board of Directors member and Member of the Executive Committee of the UAE National Library and Archives, and ICA President, David Fricker (right), virtually signing a memorandum for understanding for the ICA conference in July 2022. On the same webpage it is stated that the conference was rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also claimed that the conference will have a “positive financial result for ICA’s ongoing programmes” and would provide “much-needed” financial resources for the ICA. Apart from the issue of the ICA depending on UAE oil money, one question comes to my mind from this screenshot: this signing could be virtual, why couldn’t the whole conference?

Notes

[1] See the IFLA’s press release on August 11, 2023, entitled “IFLA Governing Board decides on WLIC 2024” and tweets from Violet Fox, Annie Pho (past president of Asian Pacific American Librarians Association and Library Juice Press editor), Lauren Crossett, Valerie Hawkins, Tara Donnelly, Alex Brown, Niall O’Brien, Naomi House (see here and here), Mike Cosgrave, Liam Hogan, Siân Woolcock, Martin O’Connor, Alison Harding, Rob Bittner, Andrea Dillion, Karen Steiger, Ferran Burguillos, Franck Garot, Jamie Finch, Alan Carbery, Isalline, David Wright, Ric Paul, COBDC, Barbara Band, Peter Coles, Matthew Noe, Imogen Negomi, Richard Neil, Jo Wood, Cathal McCauley, Jo Harcus, Caroline Ball, Brendan Teeling, Lyn Robinson, Omorodion Okuonghae, Lesley Pitman, Scott Walter, Felicity Jupiler, Rob Thomson, Tarry MacDonald, CILIP Library and Information History Group, Stuart Dempster, and many others here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. For those in favor, see tweets from Adegbilero Idowu and Dr. Bashayer Alrandi (also see here).

[2] “About the ICA Congress,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “ICA CONGRESS ABU DHABI 2023,” LinkedIn, accessed Aug. 15, 2023;  and see tweets by Larry the Librarian, Louise Cooke-Escapil, Queer Library Alliance, Naomi House, Jennifer Bayjoo, and Piu Martinez, along with a tweet by ICA Congress Abu Dhabi here.

[3] See ICA tweets here, here, and here; tweets by Meg Phillips, Vice President of Programmes at ICA here and here; tweet by ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023 here and here; “Biography of Director General of the UAE National Library and Archives,” UAE National Library and Archives, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “SDAA, National Archives enhance strategic partnership,” Emirates News Agency, Oct. 20, 2020; “His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s Message,” UAE National Library and Archives, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; the Library Association of Ireland’s “Response to the announcement by IFLA that Dubai, United Arab Emirates will host the 2024 IFLA World Library and Information Congress” statement, BibliotequesBCN‘s thread ending here, and my conversation with Piu Martinez ending here, my mention of the conference here, and my open support of a boycott here.

[4] “Travel Information,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Chairman of the National Library and Archives’ Board of Directors Message,” UAE National Library and Archives, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Vision, Mission & Values,” UAE National Library and Archives, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “About Us,” UAE National Library and Archives, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Our Duties,” UAE National Library and Archives, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Biographies,” UAE National Library and Archives,” accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Memberships/Partnerships/Agreements,” UAE National Library and Archives,” accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Halls of the National Library and Archives,” UAE National Library and Archives,” accessed Aug. 15, 2023; tweets by ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023 here and here; “Abu Dhabi Convention and Exhibition Bureau,” Experience Abu Dhabi, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Exhibitors,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023.

[5] See tweets by ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023 here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here; posts on the ICA Congress Abu Dhabi LinkedIn page here and here; “Sponsors,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023;  “Travel Information,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Delegate Site Visit,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Spouse/Partner Program,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Exhibiting Opportunities,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Programme,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Authors and sessions chair – ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Description of sub-themes,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “ICA Congress Bursary Program,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; “Hackathon,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; tweet by UAE National Library and Archives here.

[6] “The Role Of The Colonizer: France’s Intervention In Mali,” NPR, Feb. 4, 2013; Porter, Bernard, “Mali intervention: when former imperial powers step in,” The Guardian, Jan. 13, 2013; “French Intervention in Mali: Causes and Consequences,” Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Jan. 20, 2013; “France calls time on anti-jihadist Operation Barkhane in Sahel, ” BBC News, Nov. 9, 2022; Kane, Papa Samba. “The French colonial designs in Mali,” Al Jazeera, Aug. 22, 2019; Timothy Robbins, Hijab Shah, and Melissa Dalton, “U.S. Support for Saudi Military Operations in Yemen,” CSIS, Mar. 23, 2018; Reidel, Bruce. “A brief history of America’s troubled relationship with Yemen,” Brookings Institution, Oct. 22, 2018; “France voices support for Saudi campaign in Yemen,” France24, Dec. 4, 2015; “Pressure mounts on Western powers to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia,” France24, Aug. 23, 2016.

[7] See “Overview of ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023; tweets by EXPM, Preservica, Nicola Laurent (here, here, and here), and others here, here, here, along with tweet by the ICA here; tweets by ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023 here and here; posts on the ICA Congress Abu Dhabi LinkedIn page here and here. The first time the #ICACongressAbuDhabi hashtag was used on X/Twitter was on November 30, 2022.

[8] “2022 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: United Arab Emirates,” Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. State Department, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “2023 Investment Climate Statements: United Arab Emirates,” Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, U.S. State Department, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “Market Overview,” International Trade Association, U.S. Department of Commerce, Jul. 26, 2022.

[9] “Results of the WLIC 2024 Advisory Referendum and Volunteer Survey,” IFLA, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “Universal Periodic Review – United Arab Emirates,” U.N. Human Rights Council, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “Travel Information,” ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023, accessed Aug. 15, 2023. As I noted back in April, late Lebanese-American scholar and journalist Jack G. Shaheen in one of his seminal works, Reel Bad Arabs, defines Arabs as the hundreds of millions of people who reside in, and the millions around the world in the diaspora, from 22 Arab states: Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. One of the problems with the IFLA survey is that it does not say WHY people in regions defined as “Asia-Oceania,” “Middle East and North Africa,” and “Sub-Saharan Africa” supported Dubai as the conference location.

[10] “Trucial States in 1914,” The National Archives (UK), accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “Sharjah: the Gate to Trucial States,” UNESCO, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; Rizvi, Kishwai. “Eve Arnold in the Trucial States: The United Arab Emirates before Federation,” Platform, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “United Arab Emirates,” United States. Department of State. Bureau of Public Affairs, 1985; “Secret deals ending Britain’s control in Gulf revealed,” BBC News, Aug. 30, 2022; “United Arab Emirates,” National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “Barut, Slave Governor of Kalba,” British Library, Mar. 3, 2016. For more, see Tancred Bradshaw’s book, The End of Empire in the Gulf: From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates, and Rosemarie Said Zahlan’s book, The Origins of the United Arab Emirates: A Political and Social History of the Trucial States. On the interconnection of colonialism and homophobic laws, especially in former British colonies, see “Colonialism, homophobia and the legality of gay sex in the Commonwealth,” “From colonialism to ‘kill the gays’: The surprisingly recent roots of homophobia in Africa,” “Resisting Homophobia: The Colonial Origins of Anti-Gay Laws,” “How Britain’s colonial legacy still affects LGBT politics around the world,” and even the 2008 report from Human Rights Watch entitled “This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism.”

[11] “Federal Decree Law No. (15) of 2020 Amending Certain Provisions of the Federal Law No. (3) of 1987 Concerning the Penal Code,” UAE Ministry of Justice, p. 3; Torchia, Christopher. “Foreign couple arrested in UAE for unwed sex is released,” Associated Press, Mar. 10, 2017; Roberts, Rachel. “Couple arrested in the United Arab Emirates for ‘having sex outside marriage’,” The Independent, Mar. 8, 2017; Bamford, Emma. “Dubai court suspends jail term for beach sex couple,” The Independent, Nov. 26, 2008; “UAE jails Singapore pair for wearing women’s clothes,” BBC News, Aug. 24, 2017; Arafah, Adel. “Officials lambast capitals gay party youth,” Khaleej Times, Nov. 24, 2022; Boone, Jon. “What not to do in Dubai as a tourist,” The Independent, Oct. 13, 2017; Irish, John. “Dubai court hears French boy’s rape testimony,” Reuters, Nov. 7, 2007; Gardner, Frank. “Dubai closes club after gay night,” BBC News, Apr. 1, 2001; ZaZa, Bassam. “Two men jailed for consensual sex,” Gulf News, Apr. 10, 2012; Molloy, Parker Marie. “Brazilian Trans Women Detained in Dubai for ‘Imitating Women’,” The Advocate, Jan. 24, 2014; Sieczkowski, Cavan. “Gigi Gorgeous Was Allegedly Detained In Dubai Airport Because She’s Trans,” HuffPost, Aug. 10, 2016; “UAE rejects three transgender Emirati women’s bid for gender status change,” Al Arabiya News, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; Moukhallati, Dana. “New UAE law does not legalise sex change,” The National, Sept. 26, 2016; Singh, Namita. “UAE children’s magazine accused of promoting homosexuality with ‘gay issue’,” The Independent, Jun. 2022; “UAE retracts issue of children magazine after claims of ‘promoting homosexuality’,” The New Arab, Jun. 27, 2022; Hirwani, Peony. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse banned in UAE,” The Independent, Jun. 16, 2023; Mehta, Ashish. “New UAE laws: Is it illegal to be romantically involved with a married woman?,” Khaleej Times, Dec. 12, 2021; “The cohabitation of unmarried couples was recently decriminalised in the UAE,” The Law Reporters, Nov. 6, 2021; Cornwall, Alexander. “UAE bans Disney-Pixar film over same-sex relationship characters,” Reuters, Jun. 13, 2022; Turak, Natasha. “United Arab Emirates bans Pixar’s new Buzz Lightyear movie from theaters,” CNBC, Jun. 14, 2022; Gambrell, Jon. “United Arab Emirates bans Pixar’s ‘Lightyear’ from showing,” Associated Press, Jun. 13, 2022. Interestingly, the UAE let Barbie air despite the transgender character and feminist themes, following a month-long delay.

[12] “WLIC 2024: Briefing Paper to the Advisory Referendum,” IFLA, Jul. 2023. The same document noted that the IFLA previously chose Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a city in “a country with restrictive policies on same-sex sexual acts,” but they went through with it anyhow. They also admitted that “many LGBTQ+ potential delegates may feel unsafe or anxious” as a result of the conference location in UAE, answering the concern of one user, among others like here.

[13] See tweets by ICA Congress Abu Dhabi 2023 (see here and here), UAE National Library and Archives (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), Abu Dhabi Media Office, Andrew Asasiira, Maxwell Otte, Patrick Vanhoucke, Lesley Pitman, and CILIP Library and Information History Group; “Statement from the CILIP Library and Information History Group (LIHG) on the choice of Dubai for the 2024 IFLA World Library and Information Congress and subsequent Briefing Paper to the Advisory Referendum,” CILIP, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; “VOB staat niet achter WLIC 2024 in Dubai” [VOB is not behind WLIC 2024 in Dubai] (in Dutch), Bibliotheekblad, Aug. 11, 2023; “IFLA entscheidet: Weltkongress 2024 wird in Dubai stattfinden” [IFLA decides: World Congress 2024 will take place in Dubai] (in German), BuB, Aug. 11, 2023; Gordan, Rebecca. “Majoritet emot bibliotekskongress i Dubai – men Ifla står fast vid beslutet” [Majority against library congress in Dubai – but Ifla stands by the decision] (in Swedish), magasin K, Aug. 15, 2023; “Beslutet: Bibliotekskongressen hålls i Dubai trots kritiken” [The decision: The Library Congress is held in Dubai despite the criticism] (in Swedish), svt nyheter, Aug. 11, 2023; “Malgré l’opposition des associations, l’IFLA choisit Dubaï” [Despite association opposition, IFLA chooses Dubai] (in French), Actualitte, Aug. 14, 2023; Parker, Susan. “ARL Statement on IFLA Congress in Dubai,” Association of Research Libraries, Aug. 1, 2023.

[14] I never responded to her message, as it appeared to be spam, and may send her a message back after publishing this article.

[15] Specifically the goals “Affordable and Clean Energy”, “Decent Work and Economic Growth”, “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, “Responsible Consumption and Production”, and possibly “Climate Action”, with stated UN action toward these goals and others. The UAE claims that they are committed to ” achieve sustainable development…sustainable governance…[and] adopting consumption and production methods that enhance the quality of life of the present and future generations,” but alternate energies are not even listed on the page.

[16] Michaelson, Ruth and Patrick Greenfield, “UAE using role as Cop28 host to lobby on its climate reputation,” The Guardian, No. 26, 2022; Stockton, Nick. “Cop28 president’s team accused of Wikipedia ‘greenwashing’,” The Guardian, May 30, 2023; Carrington, Damian. “Army of fake social media accounts defend UAE presidency of climate summit,” The Guardian, Jun. 8, 2023; Hiar, Corbin and Zack Colman, “An oil state hired the biggest PR firms to buff its climate image. It didn’t help,” Politico, Jun 7. 2023; Carrington, Damian. “Leak reveals ‘touchy’ issues for UAE’s presidency of UN climate summit,” The Guardian, Aug. 1, 2023; Also see Amy Westervelt’s “So what if fossil fuel lobbyists have to declare themselves at Cop28? That won’t curb their power“.

[17] “Bestuur KVAN besluit geen afvaardiging te sturen naar congres ICA 2023 in Abu Dhabi,” [Board of KVAN decides not to send a delegation to the ICA 2023 conference in Abu Dhabi] (in Dutch), KVAN, May 5, 2023; “L’AAC comunica la decisió de no assistir al Congrés ICA Abu Dhabi 2023” [The AAC announces its decision not to attend the ICA Abu Dhabi 2023 Congress] (in Catalan), Associació de Professionals de l’Arxivística i la Gestió de Documents de Catalunya, Jul. 15, 2023; “Dubai to host IFLA WLIC 2024,” Lebanese Library Association, Jun. 23, 2023; “ALIA Statement on the IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2024,” Australian Library and Information Association, accessed Aug. 16, 2023; tweets by Saudi Library and Information Association, Emirates Libraries and Information Association, Arab Federation for Libraries and Information (also see here). The IFLA statement says Librarians Association of Malaysia (PPM) and Indian Library Association supported the location, but I cannot find a link to statements by either organization on the conference.

 

September 5, 2023September 6, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: Arab countries, archival labor, archives profession, biofuels, Britain, climate change, coal, energy consumption, environmental sustainability, FamilySearch, France, greenwashing, human rights, human rights violations, ICA, IFLA, immigration, Islam, LGBTQ+, librarianship, migrant labor, Mormons, Muslims, NARA, natural gas, Persian Gulf, petroleum, social media, solar energy, UAE, Whiteness, wind power 1 Comment

Steering Share: Meet Caitlin Rizzo

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of the Steering Committee member, Caitlin Rozzo, Archivist at the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Other members currently on the I&A Steering Committee include Danielle Simpkins, Burkely Hermann, Sheridan Sayles, Liz Call, Holly Rose McGee, and Claire Gordon.

What was your first experience working with archives?
This is always a favorite question of mine! The first time I encountered the archive, I was a sophomore in college. In the spring, I decided to launch myself head first into a project that I was objective unqualified to perform and I applied for a summer job as a Research Assistant for a professor on campus, Dr. Marguerite Rippy. I spent what felt like a magical summer researching an all-black production of Macbeth that Orson Welles directed as part of his work with the Federal Theatre Project, which required me to go to places like the Library of Congress and National Archives and Records Association. I remember very distinctly my first ever trip to an archive was the Library of Congress. The day before I met with Dr. Rippy who told me very plainly that the goal for the first day was simply to get my research card and warned me that the first day of research you always feel very lost and a little like an idiot, so as long as I got the card I should celebrate my success. Fast forward to a very confused 19 year old wondering in the tunnels (I am not even sure how I got there) at 3:00 p.m. so desperate to leave and so terrified of asking for help that I followed a group of people with suitcases around for about ten minutes hoping somehow that suitcases signified an intent to leave a building. (Truly, who would drag around suitcases if they were just planning to Sorkin walk through the tunnel? This part of the story remains a mystery.) The good news is that an hour later, I did manage to find the exit and, utterly disoriented, make my way to the metro. I kept coming back and about a week later I made my first archival “discovery”—a little advertisement for the show in Texas where the black-cast was segregated from white production staff. Two years later, when I was searching for internships I applied to the Library of Congress Junior Fellowship program. I ended up staying there for three fabulous years (and, reader, I still wound up lost in those tunnels again and again, but seriously it remains very worth it.)

What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?
This is difficult for me to answer because there are a lot of things that concern me in archives. I was incredibly fortunate to get my MLIS at the University of Maryland when Dr. Ricardo Punzalan was teaching there and I often repeat a phrase he would say that feels central to my engagement with and love of archives: “History is offensive. If it doesn’t offend you, then you might not be looking that closely.” He is such an amazing example of how a critical approach to a subject is born out of a great love for that subject and a belief in that subject’s value. This is a nice way to say that many things concern me, but that’s probably because I actively strive to be a person who is concerned and who is attentive to the struggles of others.

I would say if I had to pick one thing to talk about in this moment that issue would be divestment and prison abolition in archives and special collections. I am part of a wonderful group that meets regularly to talk about the ways the ideologies of the prison-industrial-complex pervade special collections and the ways that we benefit as a profession from prisons and prison labor. I recently have been working on a statement and thinking about how to phrase this for folks that might think that Special Collections exists in another universe from the systemic oppression of millions of the most vulnerable populations and communities around us. I think for me the idea that right now in the United States about 2.3 million people are desperately in need of evidence, of records, of proof to set themselves free should feel sinister to us as archivists. How does that word ‘evidence’ that sustains our positions (our jobs, our material wealth, and our freedom) condemn others? What do we have to do with that if we benefit from it? And truly how do two worlds seem at first so completely separate? I know of several librarians that work with incarcerated populations but very few archivists have anything to do with the incarcerated. Why is that? There are researchers, users, scholars (whatever you would like to call them that would connote to you their worthiness) who happen to be incarcerated. I have read their poetry, transcribed their letters, and maintained their work in the archive. I think we owe these individuals something better.

What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?
I hope to gain a sense of how advocacy can work in technical services. I’ve actually just started a new position that is a little more capacious, but previously all of my archival experience centered on technical or collection services. Most recently, I served as the Head of Collection Services for the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, but I often find that the work can sometimes feel unconnected from the conversations that seem the most interesting and necessary for the profession. I think largely that’s been changing with the incredible work of archivists that are tackling issues like redescription and reparative processing; however, I have found that it can be challenging to argue for advocacy in technical services. There is always the backlog, there is always software that need refinement or managing. I think of the words technical debt which always weigh heavy on your shoulders in technical services. Sometimes I think technical services gets too weighed down by those burdens of the “traditional” work of processing, description, and digitization to get to participate fully in these conversations, but the best professional development work I ever got to do was attend a Project STAND conference in Chicago and hear former Black Panthers speak to their experience with archives and activism. Those kinds of experiences feel vital and necessary to the work I do. The technology and the archival labor is not neutral. When you are so stuck trying to catch up with other institutions or new rules, it can feel really challenging to engage in what some people might cast as “value-added” work. The truth is that engaging critically with the issues and advocacy around the practice is foundational and necessary work for all of us. I firmly believe it cannot be additional or optional.

What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?
Well, lately my love of loafing and people watching has been cut short by the pandemic. I am at my core such a literature nerd, but somehow this also translates to a deep love for really “bad art.” I love bad poetry, strange/awkward one man shows, bad movies—I like seeing the things that don’t quite work out or materialize the way you thought they would. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the podcast “How Did This Get Made?” but I could listen to that endlessly. I also love podcasts from this moment deep in quarantine. The “Still Processing” podcast just came back and I could listen to the episode that breaks down the culture of public apologies a million times over. Other than that, I am generally playing around with one of my own failed crafting projects and loving on my furry family (one dog, two bunnies, and many unrealized plans for expansion of the pack).

June 3, 2021November 24, 2023 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Interviews, Steering ShareTags: archival description, archival processing, archives profession, discovery, government archives, internships, Interviews, library degrees, Library of Congress, NARA, patrons, podcasts, poetry, prison abolition, prison labor, Project STAND, redescription, reparative processing, special collections, Whiteness 6 Comments

“Far-reaching impacts”: Why the closure of NARA’s Seattle facility still matters

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following is from Burkely Hermann, recent graduate of the University of Maryland – College Park’s graduate program in Library and Information Science, with a concentration in Archives and Digital Curation.

Back on February 18, I wrote about the closure of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)’s Seattle facility, NAS for short. Recently this issue came to the fore with the publication of an article by Megan E. Llewellyn and Sarah A. Buchanan titled “Will the Last Archivist in Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights: Value and the National Archives” in the Journal of Western Archives.

The NAS facility is key to many different communities. The official page for the facility specifically highlights information they hold about Chinese immigrants and indigenous affairs, along with land records, court records, and genealogical resources. This includes tribal and treaty records of indigenous people living in the Pacific Northwest, and original case files for Chinese immigrants in the 19th century. Volunteers have been trying to index the Chinese immigrant files and create an “extensive database of family history.” This will be interrupted if the files are moved, making the database incomplete.

The NAS facility itself has regional significance. The property the facility sits on was once the location of  a prospering farm owned by Japanese immigrant Uyeji family from 1910 to 1942. [1] These immigrants were evicted from their land during World War II and put into concentration camps, like the over 120,000 Japanese Americans. The immigrant Uyeji family never returned to their home, and the land was seized by the U.S. Navy in 1945, after it had been condemned in earlier years, in order to build a warehouse. [2] The warehouse was later converted into a facility and began to be occupied by the National Archives after 1963. This transfer of ownership intersected with the history of Seattle’s development which benefited White people above those of other races, from 1923 onward.

There is more to be considered. As Llewellyn and Buchanan argue in the Journal of Western Archives, the closure of NAS is harmful, a failure at “multiple levels of government,” and was made without considering how valuable marginalized communities in the area see the records held at the facility. [3] 58,000 cubic feet are permanent records of federal agencies in the Pacific Northwest, while 6,600 cubic feet are occupied by records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs alone. [4] Neither should be destroyed per NARA guidance. This amount of cubic feet is equivalent to about 1,871 side-by-side refrigerators or about 1,234 top-mount refrigerators. [5] No matter how the size is measured, the NAS facility is well-used, as is its digital resources, by Asian-Americans, indigenous people, and various researchers. [6] Some indigenous people even called the closure and movement of records to other locations a “paper genocide.” As Bob Ferguson, the Washington State Attorney General, stated in February, moving the records from the NAS facility, to states such as California and Missouri, contradicts the purpose of the archives and impedes efforts by local families to research their ancestors.

There are other problems with the closure. Llewellyn and Buchanan pointed out, for one, the errors in the Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB)’s assessment to close the facility, noting the significant level of foot traffic, the lack of public hearings on the closure, and NARA management agreeing with the decision to close. [7] There is also  concern that not all the records held at the NAS facility could be digitized. Some news outlets, like MyNorthwest, have rightly pointed out that large items like bound books and maps might not be “properly scanned” or digitized at all. Llewellyn and Buchanan further note the involved process of digitization, and extra costs researchers will have to pay if the records from the NAS facility are moved. [8]

Readers may be asking what can be done about the closure. Now is not the time to sit back and let the Washington State government to the heavy lifting, nor the Seattle media. In the latter case, the Seattle Times opined against the decision to close the NAS facility. In the case of Washington State, Ferguson, mentioned earlier, proposed a compromise to keep the regional facility of NARA in Washington State, worrying, like others, of the prospect of losing access to “over a century of history.” But his noble efforts have been for naught. The closure is on track, with NARA justifying it based on experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the agency will be “less location dependent” in the future, with users accessing resources remotely rather than in-person. On the legal front, in August, Ferguson filed federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for public records against NARA, the Office of Management & Budget (OMB), and the General Services Administration (GSA). He also requested documents from the PBRB the same month. He stated that NARA and OMB failed to respond to requests he made in early February, while the GSA has not sent records it promised in the summer of this year. The PBRB, on the other hand, wanted taxpayers to pay about $65,000 to redact information from documents even though no sensitive information is present, as stated in various articles in the Seattle Times, HeraldNet, and Seattle Weekly. These efforts will likely go forward as Ferguson won the race to be the Attorney General of Washington State against Republican challenger Matt Larkin.

In the short-term, readers should email the OMB Director Russell Vought at Russell.t.vought@omb.eop.gov, the GSA Administrator Emily Murphy at emily.murphy@gsa.gov, Archivist David Ferriero at David.Ferriero@nara.gov, and the PBRB at fastainfo@pbrb.gov, opposing the closure of the NAS facility. Currently, the NAS facility has not been listed by the GSA for sale, whether on its database of real property or its database displaying federal properties being auctioned off. While COVID-19 makes the push for more remote learning attractive, it is still possible and vital to open in-person facilities, in line with existing rules and regulations to ensure the safety of the staff and patrons at specific facilities. In the long-term, if the NAS facility is closed, it could put other NARA facilities in jeopardy, as Llewellyn and Buchanan point out. [9] At the same time, archivists should advocate for a “massive investment in time, money, and planning” to digitize more of NARA’s holdings, as the aforementioned scholars argue for, [10] with not even 1% digitized at the present! Whether the facility is closed or not, there are dark times ahead for NARA, as less government spending may be on the horizon, unless the proposed budget for NARA is approved by the House of Representatives and Senate.

Notes

[1] Llewellyn, Megan E., and Sarah A. Buchanan, “Will the Last Archivist in Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights: Value and the National Archives and the National Archives,” Journal of Western Archives 11, no. 1 (October 12, 2020): 7, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1125&context=westernarchives.  

[2] Llewellyn and Buchanan, 7-9.

[3] Ibid, 3-4.

[4] Ibid, 4-5.

[5] Karie Lapham Fay, “Dimensions of a Standard Size Refrigerator,” SFGate, December 17, 2018, https://homeguides.sfgate.com/dimensions-standard-size-refrigerator-82262.html. I used the largest size of a side-by-side refrigerator (31 cubic feet) and largest size of a top-mount refrigerator is 47 cubic feet when using the highest numbers in Fay’s article.

[6] Llewellyn and Buchanan,  5-6.

[7] Ibid, 11-17.

[8] Ibid, 17-19.

[9] Ibid, 24-25.

[10] Ibid, 21.

November 18, 2020December 5, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archives closure, databases, digitization, federal records, genealogy, government archives, immigration, maps, NARA, National Archives at Seattle, patrons, records management, U.S. history, volunteering, Whiteness 2 Comments

Archivists on the Issues: Archives and the Rural-Urban Divide

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following post is from Bradley J. Wiles, a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Information Studies. 

In recent years, the fate of rural American communities has been prominently featured in national press coverage and soul-searching public discourse about the United States’ changing social, economic, and demographic realities. Rural communities, we have often heard, have failed to adapt to the new global economy and suffer from irreversible brain drain; they are close-minded, cultural wastelands characterized by aging populations and despair-induced morbidity; the biggest incentive they offer to would-be transplants is cheap property and good but under sourced school systems. Urban and suburban communities, by contrast, are growing steadily and have been for decades. They possess in abundance the desirable quality-of-life amenities and economic opportunities that rural communities lack, and examples abound of renewal and persistence in large cities previously written off by critics of contemporary urban policy. The biggest losers in this comprehensive demographic and economic reshuffling appear to be remote agricultural communities. Although this narrative is generally supported by the available evidence, the factors driving rural decline are complicated and often the narrative fails to capture this complexity.

So much of the recent decline narrative about rural America is related to demographic and economic trends extending from the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. Numerous writings have detailed the collusion between government, food conglomerates, and the financial sector to push maximum production and corporate models of efficiency throughout the entire American agricultural system. Unfortunately, these efforts brought about a perfect storm of conditions that resulted in massive bankruptcies and property foreclosures, rural suicide levels higher than in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the decimation of the family farm system that had been a cornerstone of rural life for over a century. Although the rural-to-urban population shift was well underway by the 1980s, this trend accelerated in all subsequent economic downturns and became virtually irreversible in the wake of the Great Recession. Similarly, rural poverty has equaled or exceeded that of urban areas for decades, and the recovery from the Great Recession has mostly bypassed rural communities, especially those in remote and sparsely populated areas. Recent reference statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture on rural recovery show that the urban-rural poverty gap has widened since the end of the recession, with employment in rural areas still not up to pre-recession levels and overall income growing at a much slower rate than non-rural locations. Additionally, the majority of remote agricultural and micropolitan areas have lost significant population since 2010, a reality that is increasingly both the cause and result of widespread economic woes.

Some recent analyses suggest that the rural population decline is a relative measure that is more reflective of the changing designations of areas and communities from rural to suburban or urban. Indeed, in some areas with remarkable geographical features or that are accessible to urban amenities, rural areas have experienced a net population growth. However, remote rural areas have experienced a near fatal combination of declining in-migration, increasing out-migration, and lower natural replacement levels related to resident fertility and aging. Lower fertility rates and higher average ages exacerbate resource-depleted remote rural areas that already have trouble attracting adequate health care services, funding public works, and providing other basic needs for its residents. Because of larger economic trends that afford more opportunities in cities and suburbs, young people who grow up in rural communities are less likely to move back once they have left. Those who never leave or who do return often find themselves in settings that are ill-prepared to nurture families, develop human capital, and take advantage of the experience and skills that these people bring to the community.

Despite the overarching demographic and socioeconomic trends, rural residents are generally optimistic about their lives and futures in their communities. According to recent surveys conducted by the Harvard Opinion Research Program, the majority of rural Americans hold negative views about their local economy and a large portion experience financial insecurity, but they also feel engaged in their communities and are hopeful that most issues can be corrected in the near future. The surveys identify a host of problems related to employment, housing, substance abuse, health care, and social isolation but respondents generally expressed appreciation for the safety and quality of life in their communities. Of course, the relative level of satisfaction likely has as much to do with the racial, cultural, and economic background of the survey’s respondents. The study reported more difficulties from members of racial or ethnic minority groups and people with disabilities living in these communities, including a significant discrepancy between how minorities and non-minorities view discrimination and general treatment of non-majority residents.

This blinkered view of rural America–both from its residents and from those observing at a distance–is likely what makes the real problems of decline seem so intractable. Certainly it contributes to the variance of the narrative based on where it is coming from. What emerges from countless books, reports, policy papers, articles, opinion pieces, and blog entries is subject to interpretation through a variety of political, social, and cultural filters. On the one hand, it is easy to believe that rural America is doomed, especially the really hard-hit areas that cannot seem to catch a break. On the other hand, there are many indications of resilience and a willingness of these communities to adjust, adapt, and fight on despite the odds. For many people, both urban and rural, geography is destiny and the ability to stay, leave, or return is largely a matter of relative means and privilege. The affective impact of the narrative often becomes one of cautionary wistfulness: what do we lose as a country when such a significant part of it is clearly threatened by trends we understand but appear to have no power to control?  How bad does it have to get before we muster the political will for substantive collective action to fix things? With few exceptions, the consensus around the narrative seems to be that rural America is worth saving, but there is little agreement about how this might be accomplished without further enabling the urbanization trends that harm remote rural areas in the first place.

Robert Wuthnow described how the rural experience manifests in a patchwork of moral communities throughout the country centered around education, faith, and work, and embodied in the disappearing rural institutions of the schoolhouse, church, and farmstead.^[1] These moral communities are bound by common experience and values developed across generations, which helps them weather disruptions and adapt to change. However, the ability of communities to exist in the relative autonomy and independence of previous eras is rapidly disintegrating and many of the resulting changes are unwelcome. A recurring theme throughout rural American  history–in areas entirely settled by outsiders–is the resistance to newcomers. Although the demographic composition of rural communities varies throughout the United States, with the exception of Native American reservations and other anomalous communities, rural residents tend to be white and of European descent, with increasing numbers of people from Latin America settling into these areas on a temporary or permanent basis. This growing diversity in rural America represents one of the clearest links between the urban and rural cultural dichotomy, which, in combination with language and other cultural differences, engenders a potent strain of identity-based resentment among the majority population. Ugly and violent distortions of traditional white masculinity have been present for decades in rural America, but its recent outward activity is mostly relegated to the political fringes.

However, American history is full of examples of community identity being tied to and expressed through political activity, and as the real or perceived impact of decline advances, a more rigid political landscape across rural America appears to be developing. According to Jon Lauck, the 2016 election offered evidence of a growing rural identity or consciousness that seeks less to highlight issues important to its communities, than to cast themselves in opposition to the interests in Washington D.C., New York City, Hollywood, and other urban areas that have appeared to ignore their plight and assist their demise.^[2] This seems to be driven by a last-stand mentality, a final striking out against the enemies of a way of life that was at one time the defining model of the American experiment. Thus, the decline narrative finds rural communities looking backward and preoccupied with capturing the essence, if not the substance, of lifeways that have passed. The prospect of actual annihilation increasingly overshadows the symbolic annihilation or misrepresentation that these communities have always experienced to some degree, if not to the exaggerated extent that some political opportunists claim. To many communities and their inhabitants, the current moment represents a historical tipping point, made more real by the ongoing upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overdue reckoning on racial justice, the possibility of a long recession, and the certainty of a contentious national election.

So what does this mean for archives and archivists? In researching her memoir of growing up poor in rural Kansas, Sarah Smarsh refers to the difficulty of locating adequate resources “to piece together a family history from the ill-documented chaos that poverty begets.”^[3] Smarsh’s account spans the Farm Crisis years to present day and surfaces important issues around the lack of understanding of marginal communities that seem, on the surface, to be adequately represented in the public consciousness. However, the representation of the rural poor–regardless of what other intersectional identity categories they embody–in archives and other collecting institutions is equally problematic. Memory and cultural institutions have long documented agriculture, agribusiness, small towns, and rural life to some degree, but this tends to focus on official records and notable or powerful residents who are almost always men. As such, the stories of working poor, women, minority groups, immigrants, non-mainstream subcultures, and others lacking political, social, and economic capital are typically lost through neglect, hostility, or indifference. Anne Effland attributes this lack of historical understanding to the limited scope given to the domain of what we consider to be rural, which is undoubtedly reflected in the documentation of rural communities.^[4] Certainly nowadays “rural” no longer equates strictly to “farming,” and it has not for some time now. Understanding the complex identities and issues associated with the decline of rural communities requires archival efforts that acknowledge the political, demographic, and socioeconomic variation in and among those communities.

But even with the archives profession turning more toward community focused approaches to research and practice, rural communities have been largely absent from the disciplinary literature. Searches for articles in all major archival studies publication databases turned up scant reportage on documenting rural communities, subjects, issues, or historical trends, even in the region-specific journals. This sentiment was captured in a panel session called “Documenting Flyover Land” for the Midwest Archives Conference annual meeting in 2018, which sought to highlight specific archival projects related to the rural Midwest. In the introduction to the session, panel chair Christina Hansen spoke about the urban bubble that even most Midwesterners live in suddenly bursting after the 2016 election results.^[5] What was described by many pundits and politicos (and certainly many liberal-learning archivists) as the horrific outcome of resentment-based politics only partially reflected the reality; it also signalled something deeper about rural America and its desire to make its voice heard. It should also have signaled to archivists that the call for a truly representative record and profession is disingenuous if the rural perspective continues to be pushed aside in our work and discussions. The response from archivists is yet to be determined.

Fostering a sense of place, representation, and belonging may not be enough to reverse decades of unfavorable trends, but memory institutions have a distinct role to play in how rural communities conceive of themselves in various regional, national, and global contexts. As such, these institutions have an opportunity to exert an affective and intellectual influence on their communities, grounded in shared history and experience, as its members look toward their uncertain individual and collective futures. By helping communities understand, document, and celebrate their past, archives and other memory institutions can serve as change agents that provide reassurance of a community’s role in its own destiny. By providing an outlet to and for information, education, and culture they can help these communities articulate their stories and values, and help ease the transition to different modes of living. And another big transition is already underway, whether or not anyone involved is ready.

^[1] Wuthnow, R. (2018). The left behind: Decline and rage in rural America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

^[2] Lauck, J. K. (2017). Trump and the Midwest: The 2016 presidential election and the avenues of Midwestern historiography. Studies In Midwestern History, 3(1), 1-24.

^[3] Smarsh, S. (2018). Heartland: A memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on earth. New York: Scribner.

^[4] Effland, A. B. W. (2000). When rural does not equal agricultural. Agricultural History, 74(2), 489-501.

^[5] Hansen, C., Anderson, M., Beckey, J., Chumachenko, V., & Dunn, R. (2018, March). Documenting flyover land. In C. Hansen (Chair), Blurring boundaries, crossing lines: The 2018 Midwest Archives Conference annual meeting. Panel session conducted at the meeting of the Midwest Archives Conference, Chicago, Illinois.

July 20, 2020December 5, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archives profession, COVID-19, databases, disabilities, discrimination, genealogy, immigration, Indigenous people, job security, Latino people, memory institutions, statistics, U.S. history, urban areas, Whiteness 1 Comment

Steering Shares: Centering BIPOC Voices

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of the past-chair of the I&A committee, Courtney Dean, the head of the Center for Primary Research and Training in UCLA Library Special Collections.

Following the deluge of organizational statements issued in support of racial justice (see this excellent list compiled by Project STAND), many archival institutions are rushing to embark upon antiracist work including description or redescripiton projects and new collecting efforts. While it’s extremely heartening to see mainstream institutions finally reconsider the treatment of BIPOC materials, staff, and communities we serve, rather than repeatedly issuing hollow commitments to EDI, I can’t help but think of a comment made during the recent Workplace Racial Equity Symposium: this urgency is in and of itself a product of white supremacy. So then, how do we ensure that we’re not simply dashing off bespoke projects that appease administrators but do little to enact lasting systemic change? Perhaps we should start by doing our homework.

The inimitable Dorthy Berry recently tweeted, “A new rule for archivists/librarians: before you ask anyone else about how to curate/describe/interpret historical materials related to African American history or racism, first you have to read even a single article about the genre/topic at hand.” I would add to this, take a look around your own institution before scrambling to acquire new collections. What voices and stories may be hidden in your holdings, silenced or erased through past descriptive practices, or lingering in your backlog? What reparative relationships with donors and communities can be made? 

When looking outside your own institution, consider who has been doing this work, probably unrecognized, and most likely unpaid, for years. Does your well-resourced institution really need to complete with existing community archives or reinvent the wheel when it comes to community-centered description? Are there ways to support this work that doesn’t include “hoovering up” materials? Can community members be compensated for their guidance? (Spoiler: NO, YES, YES.) 

I’ve found the following handful of readings and resources extremely helpful when conceptualizing ways that my own work, and the role I hold in my institution, can aid, rather than hinder, the dismantling of white supremacy in the archives. Oftentimes this may mean giving time and space to BIPOC colleagues and student workers to do the work they’ve long been advocating for, and taking their lead in determining the best ways I can support these efforts.

Call to Action: Archiving State-Sanctioned Violence Against Black People by Zakiya Collier

The Blackivists’ Five Tips for Organizers, Protestors, and Anyone Documenting Movements by The Blackivists

The Blackivists’ Five Tips for Donating Your Materials by The Blackivists

We Already Are by Yusef Omowale

Confronting Our Failure of Care Around the Legacies of Marginalized People in the Archives by Bergis Jules

Supporting our colleagues: Black archives, libraries, museums, and related organizations Google sheet created by the AWE Fund Organizing Committee

Black Excellence in LIS collaborative syllabus created by T-Kay Sangwand 

Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Anti-Racist Description Resources by Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia’s Anti-Racist Description Working Group

SAA Community Reflection on Black Lives and Archives

Struggling to Breathe: Covid-19, Protest, and the LIS Response by Amelia N. Gibson, Renate Chancellor, Nicole A. Cooke, Sarah Park Dahlen, Beth Patin, and Yasmeen Shorish

July 14, 2020June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Steering ShareTags: anti-racism, archival description, archives profession, BIPOC, Black history, COVID-19, donors, Google Workspace, Googlization, Project STAND, redescription, reparative processing, SAA, state violence, White supremacy, Whiteness Leave a comment

Archivists on the Issues: A Defense of Institutions in the Pandemic

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following post is from Bradley J. Wiles, a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Information Studies. 

The COVID-19 pandemic promises to be a game changer in many areas of contemporary society moving forward. Aside from the devastating mortality currently unfolding, the most immediate impact involves severe disruptions in healthcare systems, economic activity, and supply chain management, all of which have short and long term consequences for communities depending on the depth and scale of the damage in a given location. A major outcome so far is that the pandemic has forced people and organizations to rethink and reconfigure daily interactions previously taken for granted, both as a response to stemming the spread of the virus in real time and in preparation for future disruptions. For many individuals and organizations, virtual interaction through networked digital technologies has been the main route of accessing or retaining some sense of normalcy during this trying time.

In some instances, the ability (and often privilege) to utilize online communications and cloud-based applications offer the only possibility of keeping employed, delivering education, receiving medical treatment, reaching out to loved ones, and participating in other aspects of everyday life. Although the drastic modification of these and other social activities is likely temporary, the pandemic demonstrates that the value of the internet to maintain social cohesion is beyond question (if often problematic) and that many people and organizations can no longer get by without it. Ideally, this era will spark productive conversations and activity on digital infrastructure development that extends from matters of life and death during the pandemic to more prosaic cultural interests in less extraordinary times.

For better or worse, the cultural world has experienced something of a digital flourishing during this extended social distancing period. Concerts, plays, lectures, book readings, and other cultural events that were previously accessible to limited audiences are now offered regularly and freely in real time via various conferencing platforms, social media outlets, and streaming services. Approximating normalcy, staving off boredom, and raising spirits seem to be the main motivations of these efforts, but these also serve to bolster online communities and their cultural correspondents by keeping the focus of cultural interests within the online environment where so much other activity already occurs.

For their part, many individuals and organizations in the archives sector have tried to maintain their regular duties and transition further to online delivery of services. A recent post in Atlas Obscura described several notable projects aimed at engaging new and existing user communities through the web. These and other ongoing institutional efforts reflect theoretical discussions and practical trends in the archives discipline that emphasize the growing importance of community-based initiatives to expand their scope and direction toward greater inclusion and representation, while also supporting the network of non-institutional cultural heritage interests in documenting an increasingly diverse society.

The proliferation of web-based technologies has helped facilitate the growth of independent community archives, as well as enabling traditional archives to establish more targeted documentation strategies and projects that incorporate the expertise, perspectives, and labor of non-archivist collaborators in everything from collection development to public programming to archival description. The prevailing notion is that archival work can no longer discount the people, groups, cultures, and identities reflected in the collections and that, whenever possible, those who might legitimately speak on their behalf should be involved. Often these are current or prospective audiences that can bring a fuller understanding to the collections–a process made more immediate and accessible by mobile digital networks and social media utilities.

Undoubtedly, sustained effort to engage new and diverse publics is a moral and practical necessity for all archives institutions in this emergent digital reality heightened by the pandemic, regardless of one’s location in the overarching network of cultural interests. The pandemic also offers an opportunity for American archivists and other records and information professionals to advocate on behalf of our institutions and our shared principles as a bulwark against the entrenched difficulties of reaching common ground on facts, evidence, and truth in a tribalist and politically polarized society. Journalist David Roberts has spent the past several years tracking this “epistemic crisis,” which he links to comprehensive right-wing attempts at undermining public faith in government, academia, media, and science¹. We see firsthand how dangerous this is in the current administration’s woefully inadequate, dishonest, and fatalistic approach to a national and global emergency.

However, this only tells part of the story. Various strains of the skeptical relativism that characterize the current social and political landscape are residual holdovers of intellectual movements originating in the academic left during the 1960s and 1970s. Although many of these movements were focused on peace, justice, equality, and liberation, they were fundamentally based on mistrust of institutions. It is most definitely a stretch to draw moral equivalency between armed protestors railing against social distancing measures in 2020 with activists marching to protest the Vietnam War in 1968, but the impulse to react and respond to real and perceived threats from powerful institutions transcends political identification and ideology.

The personalized information universes enabled by the web now make it easier for groups and individuals to coalesce around a narrow agenda or set of beliefs without having to engage in wider discussions that contradict these. Everybody has their own unfalsifiable truth and nobody can deny anyone else’s reality. In this setting, facts and evidence supported by verifiable information and reliable records are meaningless, or rather they hold only situational meaning and arbitrary relevance. Institutions are suspect because they are gatekeepers incapable of serving all equally or effectively.

Undermining an institution involves discrediting its experts, rejecting its animating ideas or mission, disparaging its central functions, and casting doubt on its social value and historical legitimacy. In most instances, this arises against an institution’s authority from an external oppositional standpoint, but with archives the opposition and skepticism frequently originate within the profession. This often takes the form of critical evaluation and deliberative efforts by scholars and practitioners to improve institutions. But there are several intellectual and activist strands that seem equally intent on categorizing mainstream archives institutions as just another tool of systemic oppression, an irredeemable cog in the larger framework of white supremacy, colonialism, misogyny, economic exclusivity, heteronormativity, etc.

Certainly, there are many instances over time that justify a skeptical or even pessimistic position on mainstream or traditional archives. There’s no doubt that the prominence of community-centered models based around intersectionality and social justice in recent disciplinary conversations reflects attempts to redress such historical marginalization. Although there seems to be general consensus in the profession that this is a net positive for archives, I don’t think anyone can determine with any certainty what the long-term impact of this shifting focus might be on the mainstream institutional networks or on the historical record more generally. That said, precarity related to funding, technology, and administration all present more of a threat to traditional archives than the muddled postmodern criticisms of scholars, but the lack of any comprehensive defense of institutions in the face of inward criticism and outward threats is still very unfortunate.

It is my belief that a positive defense of institutions must be made to internal skeptics and external parties that are unaware of the value that archives provide. This is not a “you’re either for us or against us” proposition, but rather a reminder of the important role that institutions play in cultural memory and democratic stability. If the past few years have revealed anything about power and authority, it is how easily norms can be discarded by unprincipled leadership. If the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us anything, it is that information, facts, and evidence are a matter of life and death. It should be clear by now that our institutions are largely responsible for holding the line against historical threats, both those posed by rare natural phenomena and others resulting from the epistemological free-for-all of the digital age. Archives institutions are flawed but essential social assets that still offer the possibility of finding common ground and preserving the truth.

¹ See the following articles for more reportage and details on Roberts’ view: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology; https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/america-epistemic-crisis; https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/16/20964281/impeachment-hearings-trump-america-epistemic-crisis

May 11, 2020June 22, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the IssuesTags: archival description, archival theory, archives profession, collection development, COVID-19, gatekeeping, memory institutions, U.S. history, White supremacy, Whiteness 1 Comment

ICYMI: Introducing the A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources

Our ICYMI series provide summaries of presentations, publications, webinars, and other educational opportunities that are of interest to I&A members. If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com. The following is from Annalise Berdini, Digital Archivist at Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library and member of A4BLiP. 

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 activist and founder of the organization Don’t Shoot PDX. Following the presentation, Teressa asked the group for recommendations for how she might approach a catalog audit. She wanted to initiate a project at Oregon State Library after learning about a racist subject catalog card there that a staff member had posted on Twitter. (The card read, “Negroes see also Crime and criminals. Portland.”)  

After some discussion, A4BLiP members realized that this was an area that lacked guidance for those doing archival description; many could recount instances of seeing description applied in ways that were racist, but none of us knew of any specific recommendations for how to address this in a programmatic way. As a way to both provide a framework for our own audits of racist description and to hopefully provide guidance that would be useful to other (white) archivists, we decided to create a set of recommendations collated from existing resources that we gathered for an extensive literature review, and enhanced by some of our own experiences. Additionally, the working group felt strongly that due to the fact that most of us were white women, we needed to ask for help from Black archivists to ensure that our recommendations did not cause harm and that we were, in fact, helping other archivists create more inclusive description. We created a GoFundMe for the project so that we could pay these reviewers for their time and expertise, and successfully funded enough to recruit nine reviewers, who contributed extensive recommendations and additional resources to the project. We are incredibly grateful for their assistance, which created a much stronger and more thoughtful product. 

The A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources are broken up into three sections: a set of metadata recommendations, an annotated bibliography, and an extensive bibliography. The extensive bibliography was gathered first, reviewed in detail by members of the working group, and informed the other two sections.

The metadata recommendations are comprised of practical examples for anti-racist description that we hope can be put into practice across a wide array of institutions. The section is broken up into seven areas of focus, including Voice and Style, Community Collaboration and Expanding Audiences, Auditing Legacy Description and Reparative Processing, Handling Racist Folder Titles and Creator-Supplied Description, Describing Slavery Records, Subjects and Classification, and Transparency. Our recommendations in each of these sections were informed by our literature review as well as examples from our own experiences and the experiences and recommendations of our reviewers. Some recommendations should be fairly easy to apply day-to-day, like removing flowery and valorizing language in biographical notes or using accurate strong language like ‘rape’ or ‘lynching’ when appropriate. Others are more difficult and will require institutional change, like developing and maintaining ongoing relationships with collection creators in order to learn the language they use to describe themselves —  and to use that language in our description of their records. We hope that these recommendations will give others practical places from which to start their own descriptive review processes. They are by no means exhaustive, but include what we thought to be the most helpful and important recommendations.

The annotated bibliography includes a selection of theory-focused articles from the extensive bibliography that we chose to highlight based on their critique of descriptive practice and theory. Some of the articles, blogs, and presentations included do not necessarily focus on Black experiences or collections in the pursuit of highlighting shared strategies for anti-oppressive description. Our review in preparation for developing this resource reinforced our understanding that there is a wealth of research and dozens of important contributions to rectifying archival erasure and white supremacist description. But we recognize that few of us have as much time as we would like to read all of these works, and so we created the annotated bibliography in the hopes that it would help others quickly find resources that would help them rethink archival description.

For those looking to get started on creating more inclusive description, we recommend checking out the metadata recommendations first, particularly the sections on Voice and Style, Auditing Legacy Description, and Handling Racist Folder Titles and Creator-Supplied Description. These are probably the sections that will be most immediately applicable to most archives — how many of us have seen overly flowery and glowing biography notes of ‘great white men’, or passive language used to describe atrocities or distance humanity? How often do slavery records prioritize the enslavers before the enslaved? This is work that we as archivists can address quickly and which (hopefully) does not require overarching institutional change. 

We acknowledge that our recommendations are a starting point that highlights the work that other archivists have already done, but we hope that by gathering some of these practical recommendations, more of us can begin to undo the harm that our description often causes. The recommendations can be found through the A4BLiP site.

December 5, 2019June 22, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: ICYMITags: anti-racism, archival description, archival processing, archival theory, archives profession, erasure, inclusion, redescription, reparative processing, sexual violence, White supremacy, Whiteness 1 Comment

ICYMI: Society of California Archivists Annual General Meeting

Our ICYMI series provide summaries of presentations, publications, webinars, and other educational opportunities that are of interest to I&A members. If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com. The following is from Rachel Mandell, I&A’s past-chair and Metadata Librarian at the USC Digital Library.

 

Last month I attended the Society of California Archivists Annual General Meeting, which was held in Long Beach, California from April 24-27, 2019. I found much of the program to be of interest to our Issues & Advocacy members as many of the presentations and events were focused on inclusivity and diversity. The reception for the event was held on the Queen Mary ocean liner, which was fun for archivists and ghosts alike.

        One of the highlights of the conference was Michelle Caswell’s plenary discussing a feminist standpoint appraisal of archival materials. She argued that instead of continuing to allow historically dominant perspectives of what should, and should not, be considered of significant archival value, we ought to adopt a new way of appraising archival materials. The historically dominant perspective– which favors white, English-speaking, straight, men—continues to dominate when archivists from oppressed communities are left out of appraisal discussions and policies. What is even more likely than archivists from the underrepresented or oppressed perspectives being left out of the conversation, is archivists’ attempt to achieve a “value neutral” view of archival materials. Professor Caswell completely dismantles this belief that neutrality can be achieved and adds that this goal of neutrality in fact reinforces the current, oppressive structure.  Boom! I am so inspired to read forthcoming publications and eventually put into practice a new set of questions that we need to ask ourselves when conducting archival appraisal.

        Another exciting event that I want to highlight was the Labor Brown Bag lunch! In the last year, Issues and Advocacy has been very focused on labor issues faced by archivists. SCA is also joining the conversation! This brown bag lunch was an informal discussion and brainstorming session about forming a new SCA working group to monitor and address ongoing labor issues.

        Other talks related to inclusivity and diversity included:

“Building Belonging: Strategies for Diverse and Inclusive Collection Development, Inreach, Outreach, and Instruction”     
Zayda Delgao, Sonoma County Library
Robin M. Katz, University of California, Riverside
Craig Simpson, Son Jose State University

“Putting it Out There: Engaging Communities and Enhancing Access to LGBT Collections”

“Campfire: Practicing Inclusive Archival Description”
Noah Geraci, University of California, Riverside
Cyndi Shein, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“Empowering Indigenous Communities through Inclusion”
Kelsey Martin
Stefani Baldivia, California State University, Chico
Celestina Castillo, Occidental College
Lylliam Posadas

“No Reprocessing Without Representation! Discovering Hidden Narratives During Routine Work”
Linh Gavin Do, Go For Broke National Education Center
Jamie Henricks, Japanese American National Museum
Lauren Longwell, Loyola Marymount University
Kate Wilson, Saint Mary’s College of California

May 9, 2019June 22, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: ICYMITags: archival description, archival processing, collection development, inclusion, Indigenous people, LGBTQ+, outreach, redescription, reparative processing, underrepresented communities, Whiteness 1 Comment

Steering Share: A Reading List for Practicing Allyship in Archives

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes from I&A Chair Courtney Dean, Head of the Center for Primary Research and Training in UCLA Library Special Collections.

For the final Steering Share of my term as I&A Chair I was planning to provide an update on our section’s temporary labor survey which closed earlier this month. (We had 412 responses!) Instead, when I sat down to write last evening, I quickly found myself going down the wormhole of comments about a recent blog post that was shared via Library Journal’s Twitter account. I won’t go into too much detail (you can look it up yourself) but for those unfamiliar with the situation, a WOC librarian wrote a blog post about the whiteness of library collections, and as so often happens when POC speak truth about racism, the internet trolls came out en masse. (I encourage those of you on Twitter to go in and report them. It’s a quick and somewhat satisfying process.) Appalling enough as it is to have THOUSANDS of strangers leaving vitriolic, hateful, and blatantly racist comments, while also posting photos of the author and details about her workplace, it was especially reprehensible to see other librarians attacking her.

As archivists we’re sometimes inclined to think we don’t have a similar whiteness problem in our field, however one only needs to look at the numbers, or recall the backlash to Dr. Michelle Caswell’s Dismantling White Supremacy session at SAA a few years ago. For all of our talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we still struggle to recruit and retain archivists of color, and to acknowledge bias in our collecting practices. To this day I have colleagues who refuse to recognize that archives are not neutral.

Instead of continuing to rely on the on the intellectual and emotional labor of POC colleagues to tirelessly critique and challenge this problematic myth of neutrality, I encourage my fellow white archivists to check out the reading list below and start practicing allyship. We can all be doing better.

Below is a brief reading list in no particular order:

Issues and Advocacy: Archivists On The Issues: Answering The Call For Inclusivity, Summer Espinoza https://issuesandadvocacy.wordpress.com/2018/07/18/archivists-on-the-issues-answering-the-call-for-inclusivity/

Issues and Advocacy: Archivists on the Issues: Reflections on Privilege in the Archives, Summer Espinoza https://issuesandadvocacy.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/archivists-on-the-issues-reflections-on-privilege-in-the-archives/

Issues and Advocacy: #ARCHIVESSOWHITE In The Words Of Jarrett Drake  https://issuesandadvocacy.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/archivessowhite-in-the-words-of-jarrett-drake/

Honma, T. (2005). Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 1(2). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp

Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory” Archival Science (2002) 2: 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628.

Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies vol. 5, (2018) https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6/

Nicole A. Cook Information Services to Diverse Populations: Developing Culturally Competent Library Professionals (California: ABC-CLIO, 2017)

Mario H. Ramirez (2015) Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative. The American Archivist: Fall/Winter 2015, Vol. 78, No. 2, pp. 339-356. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.339

Expanding #ArchivesForBlackLives to Traditional Archival Repositories, Jarrett Drake, June 27, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/expanding-archivesforblacklives-to-traditional-archival-repositories-b88641e2daf6

Caswell, Michelle (2017).  Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives.Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 87(3) 223-235. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu.libproxy.csudh.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/692299

Caswell, Michelle & Brilmyer, Gracen (2016).  Identifying & Dismantling White Supremacy in Archives: An Incomplete List of White Privileges in Archives and Action Items for Dismantling Them.  http://www.gracenbrilmyer.com/dismantling_whiteSupremacy_archives3.pdf  

Taylor, Chris (2017). Getting Our House in Order: Moving from Diversity to Inclusion. The American Archivist, 80(1), 19-29. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.19

April 22, 2019June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Steering ShareTags: anti-racism, archives profession, biases, cultural competence, inclusion, institutional racism, invisibility, memory institutions, racial diversity, racial oppression, SAA, temporary labor, White supremacy, Whiteness Leave a comment

Archivists on the News: Desiring Tumblr, Porn, and the Archives

Archivists on the News is a series where archivists share their perspectives on current news topics. This post comes courtesy of  Dani Stuchel, a Tuscon-based archivist and artist. Dani has performed and exhibited video work internationally, including the Andy Warhol Museum, Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Whippersnapper Gallery (Toronto), University of Arizona Museum of Art, and Shot Tower Gallery (Columbus, OH). Dani’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Critual Library & Information Studies, Smithsonian Collections Blog, Cactus Heart, Steer Queer Art Zine, and Sundog Lit.  Alongside Dr. Time Haggerty and Harrison Apple, Dani serves as a volunteer archivist for the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, an oral history and media project focused on preserving the history of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s gay and lesbian after-hours nightlife from 1950 through 1990. To find out more about their work, you can find additional information at http://www.danistuchel.com

 

“Are archivists ready for porn?”

The above question came to me as I read about Jason Scott’s plan to save Tumblr blogs from the platform’s 2018 ‘porn ban.’ In December 2018, Tumblr announced it would use algorithms to seek out, “photos, videos, or GIFs that showed real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.” Algorithmically-marked content would then be hidden from everyone except the original poster. Tumblr had become something akin to storing your bookmarks in the cloud: effective, but dull. As porn studies scholar Brian M. Watson offers, “Their pornography ban [was] a betrayal to their entire fanbase,” and Tumblr users have subsequently exited the platform en masse.

Soon after Tumblr’s announcement, Archive Team – led by Jason Scott – shared a plan to make backup copies of various Tumblr accounts and add them to the Internet Archive. Archive Team’s goal was to circumvent Tumblr’s planned un-publishing of content by creating an uncensored copy elsewhere. However, it quickly became clear that individual users would not have control over what content was included in the backup. On one hand was Tumblr, threatening to suppress your content. On the other was Scott, promising to share your content but without giving you clear-cut control over it in the future.

Tumblr’s policy and Scott’s solution were both roundly critiqued by users, activists, and scholars, who noted that both tactics undermined the autonomy and free expression of sex workers, LGBT persons, women, fetishists, and every intersecting permutation. While Tumblr was denying users a highly-valued means of sharing positive depictions of bodies which diverge from ‘the norm,’ Scott’s approach threatened to divorce sensitive, personal, and complex exchanges from their context and put them on public display. If Tumblr was suppressing circulation, then Scott was threatening to make living relationships into a digital cabinet of curiosities.

Of course, these two oppositional approaches do not represent all possible engagements with porn. As curator of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota, Rachel Mattson teaches undergraduate and graduate students about histories of sexuality, film circulation, and homemade media — sometimes using analog porn found in the Tretter’s holdings to help students recognize that, “There is no timeless norm of sex,” and that all sex can be understood as historical. A historical, constructivist approach to sex was central to early gay & lesbian liberation movements and the development of LGBT studies as an academic field. This approach continues to influence contemporary queer & trans political organizing and scholarship. Mel Leverich, archivist for the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, adds that “By excluding sexually explicit material from the archives, we also deny that people’s private sexual identity and practices are an important part of lived experience, and replicate the stigmatization of non-normative sex.” Contextualized thoughtfully, porn is an invaluable educational resource.

When the term “pornography” was coined in the 19th century, it was a label for artifacts which historians feared would morally imperil, not educate, the general public^[1]. Such panic was not new. Brian M. Watson offers that, “When [the printing press] was joined with increasing middle- and lower-class literacy, and book markets such as Holywell Street in London or the Grands-Boulevards area of Paris, it created a type of work that supposedly had an ‘undesirable’ effect upon the general population.”

In other words, the main charge against porn has not been that it is useless, but that its use should be feared. Centuries later, anti-pornography feminists of the 1970s and 1980s would claim porn led to child sex abuse, rape, and violence against women^[2]. Tumblr echoed this line of thought when it explained its adult content ban as a means of ridding the platform of child pornography. (Very notably, Tumblr never attempted a similar algorithmic approach to white supremacy on the platform.)  While I cannot wade into these long debates within the space of this blog post, I would suggest that many scholars have come to see porn – like all media, genres, and forms – as neither inherently ‘good’ nor inherently ‘bad.’ Instead, power relationships, aesthetics, and desire unfold inside of porn to create complex documents meriting patient study and appreciation.

Archivists are in a perfect position to think about porn as complex documentation, and to devise strategies for working with porn in the archives. One question will prove critical in the coming decades: How do we tell ‘archive stories’ with porn, sex work, or sex as center – rather than as peripheral? One hypothetical example could be the papers of Colby Keller, a successful gay porn performer who reportedly voted for Donald Trump and who supported many of Trump’s political messages. Keller’s story as a political agent is noteworthy, and I would argue it is important to understanding the complexity of sexual-identities-as-political-identities, but it cannot be divorced from his ongoing work as a porn performer. Separating his politics from the specifics of his career is akin to telling the story of Steven Spielberg sans film. If we imagine a future wherein Keller donates his papers to an archives, many questions arise. How can archives tell stories which have sex work and porn as a center, not as a tangent? How can we think of porn context? How do we talk – with researchers, students, the public – through both the intellectual and erotic content of this work?

Alongside porn’s educational and research value, it is undeniable that porn is also a thing of desire. It is created in response to desires (those of the maker and/or the intended audience), consumed in desire (academic, artistic, sexual). If porn had no allure then its detractors would have nothing to fear. Linda Williams has written that part of watching porn is hoping to see what you don’t want to see, hoping to have your limits and boundaries pushed^[3]. Porn is a desire for excess – very untidy, ‘unprofessional.’

“But archives are full of desire already,” Rachel Mattson redirects. Visitors enter all archives with a desire to see, to touch, to know. Not just the visitors – archivists, too. But desire is troublesome. It peregrinates through – but is not subsumed by – identity or selfhood. We desire things that go against our better judgement, that bring our identities into question. We have shameful desires. Desire disrupts the professional / personal boundary. As GVGK Tang puts it, in their discussion of arranging and describing porn, “To process porn, one must consume it and risk internalizing the notion that one is a pervert for doing so.”^[4]

Facing sexual desire is a next step for archives which would engage with porn. In our discussion of LGBT archivists and archival collections, it is easy to elide sexual desire in favor of political organizing, creative aesthetics, or cultural traditions. This isn’t to say that sexual identities (including heterosexual identities) can be boiled down to sex acts, but it is to suggest that they can never be fully divorced. Though not an archives in the sense intended by most archivists, Tumblr was a valued space for producing, circulating, organizing, and keeping records of sexual practices. As a private platform, it had the unchecked power to shut out stories of desire despite public outcry. Their policies were unjust, but very telling. In the end, the platform lost the public’s confidence and investment. If we, as archivists, take seriously our mission (desire?) to tell complex stories, we cannot afford to do the same.

 

Footnotes

^[1] David Squires, “Pornography in the Library,” in Porn Archives, eds. Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky, and David Squires (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 83.

^[2] For a description of the debates of this era, see Gayle S. Rubin, “Blood Under the Bridge: Reflections on ‘Thinking Sex,’” in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 194-223.

^[3] Linda Williams, “Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field,” in Porn Archives, eds. Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky, and David Squires (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 41.

^[4] GVGK Tang, “Sex in the Archives: The Politics of Processing and Preserving Pornography in the Digital Age,” The American Archivist 80, no. 2 (2017): 444. http://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-80.2.439

 

Many thanks to Mel Leverich, Rachel Mattson, and Brian M. Watson for agreeing to be interviewed for this post and offering their thoughts on the topics discussed.

April 12, 2019June 23, 2022 by issuesandadvocacy Categories: Archivists on the NewsTags: archival processing, archives profession, class oppression, Internet Archive, Interviews, LGBTQ+, oral history, sexual violence, social media, temporary labor, White supremacy, Whiteness Leave a comment