As an online event, attendees and presenters will be coming from many different places around the world. However, we wish to expressly acknowledge that the UBC iSchool is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

In lieu of charging a student fare for this event, we encourage attendees to support Pivot Legal Society.

Records and Archives in Times of Crisis

Following a year ravaged by various public health and safety crises across the globe, memory workers in numerous roles have seen their responsibilities evolve along with our social and political landscapes. In addition to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have faced a continuous increase in overt racism and state-sanctioned violence against Black, Indigenous, and First Nations peoples as well as communities of color. We have also felt the devastating effects of climate change on underserved communities as well as natural disasters that put our physical iterations of collective memory at risk. Just as these crises affect individuals and communities, they also impact and shape records, archives, and memory institutions--and vice versa. As archivists, records managers, and memory workers, we must ask ourselves what our role is in our current social and political climate as racial injustice and climate change continue to wreak havoc on our most vulnerable populations. How do we address injustice and instability in our records and archives? How do we mitigate them? How can we make the biggest impact for those who continue to suffer from their effects? For our upcoming 2021 Discussion Series, we hope to begin a dialogue that addresses these questions as well as the complex issues and concerns that necessarily come along with them. We have chosen to focus on racial injustice and climate change within the same series because their causes and effects are often inextricable. 

In this third panel, we’ll be focusing on practicing allyship in the archives as archivists, records managers, and memory workers. We’ve invited professionals who have experience working as allies in support of communities that have been historically marginalized, misrepresented, maligned, and omitted from the historical record to engage in discussion and attempt to answer questions posed by students at UBC’s School of Information. Consideration will be given to how we can best incorporate practices such as harm reduction, social justice promotion, and community support, representation, and amplification to take concrete steps toward positive change while avoiding pitfalls like guilt and false empathy.

 For information about our two other panels in the series, please visit the registration pages for Responding to Climate Change (March 26) and Documenting Injustice as it Unfolds (April 30).

About the Speakers

Erica Hernández-Read is Head of the Northern BC Archives & Special Collections at the University of Northern British Columbia where she lives, works and learns on the traditional, unceeded territory of the Lheidli T’enneh Nation. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and her M.A.S. in Archival Studies from UBC and has spent the last 20 years working in the field of archives and collections management. Erica is co-Chair of the Response to the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce of the Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives, member of the Indigitization Program Steering Committee, and President of the Association of Canadian Archivists (2021-22).

Tonia Sutherland is assistant professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Prior to joining the faculty at UHM, Sutherland was an assistant professor in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. Sutherland holds a PhD and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information (formerly the School of Information Studies), and a BA in history, performance studies, and cultural studies from Hampshire College. Global in scope, Suther­land’s research focuses on entanglements of technology and culture, with particular emphases on critical and liberatory work within the fields of archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies (STS).

Zakiya Collier is the Digital Archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where she uses web archiving tools to expand the nature of archival collections to reflect 21st-century Black life and experiences. She holds an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, an MLIS from Long Island University, and a BA in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina. Zakiya is an affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies (CR+DS) at New York University, an Interim Board Member of the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI), and a guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of The Black Scholar on Black Archival Practice.  

Gracen Brilmyer is an Assistant Professor at McGill University's School of Information Studies. They received their PhD from the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a Certificate in Gender Studies. They have a background in digital scientific archives and art as well as an interest in the history of disability, specifically erased or partial narratives of disabled people in archival/historical material. Their research, located at the intersection of critical archival studies and disability studies, focuses on the ways in which disabled people use, experience, and understand themselves through archives as well as how we can tell histories of disability when there is little or no archival evidence. Through addressing the history of natural history museums and their archives, Brilmyer traces the conflation of disability, race, and animality within natural history and centers inquiry on how ableism is a central tenet of colonialism. Outside academia, they are involved in disability justice, design justice, and social justice technologies.

Additional notes:

The ACA student chapter at UBC would like to thank the Association of Canadian Archivists for their support of this panel series

This webinar will be recorded for later publication by ACA@UBC