While trauma-informed archival practice is emerging as an emphasis of scholarship, there is no research corpus attending to the emotions experienced by archivists in collection stewardship work. The authors contemplate if the benchmarks for archivists articulated by the Society of American Archivists contribute to a nexus of emotional labour in collection strategy and management including acquisitions, processing, promotion, and preservation. In this construct, the research emplaces emotional labour as an interface between personal selves and the society’s “expectations for professional actions and engagement.”
The authors recast the skill of “radical acceptance” in archival contexts as an interdisciplinary paradigm of resilience that honours the spectrum of emotions embedded in and induced by collection stewardship. Informed by psychological research, including Arlie Russell Hochschild’s concept of “emotional labour” and Panikkos Constanti and Paul Gibbs’ emotional labour framework, they underscore the question: How can archivists actualize emotional agility at work? With radical acceptance, archivists can reclaim agency by regulating feelings of attachment and perceived control in curatorial decisions when acquiring, stewarding, and letting go of collections.
Bio notes
Kristen J. Nyitrayis Director, Special Collections and University Archives, and University Archivist at Stony Brook University.
Dana Reijerkerkis the Knowledge Management and Digital Assets Librarian at Stony Brook University.
