Michelle Caswell, Associate Professor, UCLA

Anna Robinson-Sweet, Doctoral Student, UCLA

The UCLA Community Archives Lab, in partnership with The Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), is conducting a three-year participatory action research (PAR) to assess the affective impact of digital technologies on the creation of records documenting minoritized communities by community-based archives (CBAs). Through interviews and focus groups with people who told their stories to each organization through digital projects, this research examines both the emotional impact of creating records for inclusion in archives and the impact of digital technologies on storytelling. The project addresses many of the emerging needs of archives, especially the growing recognition of the need to mitigate potential harms for record creators and users, and the growing dependence on digital technologies across the archives, museum, and LIS fields in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper will present on the initial findings of these interviews and focus groups, addressing the complex interplay between relationships, emotions, motivations for storytelling, and digital participation. It will also detail a community-led participatory action research methodology in which research findings inform the creation of new digital projects at community archives, pointing to ethical collaborations between academic researchers and community archivists.

Michelle Caswell, PhD, (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Caswell directs a team of students at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab (https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/), which explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organizations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saada.org). She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Her work has defined and refined core concepts in critical archival studies, including archival imaginaries, community archives, imagined records, radical empathy, survivor-centered archives, and most recently, feminist standpoint appraisal.

      
Anna Robinson-Sweet is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles and a graduate student researcher at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab. Her research focuses on if and how archives and records can be used by communities in achieving accountability for state violence. Previously, Robinson-Sweet was an archivist at The New School Archives and Special Collections in New York. She holds an MLIS from Simmons University.