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 The Hogan's Alley 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 second panel, we’ll be focusing on documenting injustice as it unfolds from the perspective of archivists, records managers, and memory workers. We’ve invited professionals from various backgrounds who have experience documenting and preserving evidence of state-sanctioned violence, human rights violations, and social movements to engage in discussion and attempt to answer questions posed by students at UBC’s School of Information. Consideration will be given to how the collection, preservation, and access of records related to injustice in its many forms impact such concerns as privacy, accountability, and trauma, as well as how an ethics of care may shape the future of a more informed and involved profession.

 For information about our two other panels in the series, please visit the registration pages for Responding to Climate Change (March 26) and Allyship in the Archives (May 28).

About the Speakers

Verne Harris heads the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s leadership and knowledge development processes. He was Mandela’s archivist from 2004 to 2013, directed the Foundation’s archives programme for 15 years and the dialogue and advocacy programme for 5 years. He is an adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela University, participated in a range of structures which transformed South Africa’s apartheid archival landscape, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and is a former Deputy Director of the National Archives. He has authored or co-authored six books, but is probably best-known for leading the editorial team on the best-seller Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cordoba in Argentina (2014), held the Follet Chair at Dominican University (Chicago) in 2018-9, received archival publication awards from Australia, Canada and South Africa, and both his novels were short-listed for South Africa’s M-Net Book Prize. He has served on the Boards of Archival Science, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Freedom of Expression Institute, and the South African History Archive.

Yvonne Ng is the Archives Program Manager at WITNESS, where she trains and supports partners on collecting, managing, and preserving video documentation for human rights advocacy and evidence. She also develops training resources related to archiving and preservation. Prior to joining WITNESS in 2009, Yvonne worked as a Research Fellow on the Preserving Digital Public Television Project, and at NYU Libraries, New York Public Library, and the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre. Yvonne holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University and a BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. Yvonne formerly served on the Board of Directors for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) and on the Advisory Board of Documenting the Now, and is currently an advisor for the Memory Lab Network and OpenArchive. She also recently served as a mentor in the AMIA Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship Program.

Gabriel D. Solis is the director of the Texas After Violence Project, where his work focuses on documenting and archiving stories and other materials related to the widespread impacts of state-sanctioned violence on individuals, families, and communities. Before returning to TAVP, Gabriel worked as a post-conviction mitigation specialist for the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, criminal justice researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and project coordinator of the Guantánamo Bay Oral History Project at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. Gabriel’s writings have appeared in the Oxford American, Scalawag, Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power, and Kula: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies. Gabriel is the recipient of the 2018 Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction and served as guest prose editor for the 2019 Pushcart Prize Selection Committee. Gabriel is currently serving as an archival consultant for the Ford Foundation’s Reclaiming the Border Narrative project. He has degrees in philosophy and Mexican American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. 

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