Announcements

New Volume: Remembering and (Re)remembering Social Justice in the 21 st Century
Publisher: FACET
Please Submit a 500 word Abstract by October 30.
Ben Alexander: Bea3@columbia.edu
We are looking for 3, maybe 4, chapters to complete our volume that is in-contract with FACET.
Verne Harris will be authoring our Forward, Trudy Peterson our Introduction and Verne Harris
our Afterword. Chapter titles include:

 Bending the Arc of History Toward Justice: The Romero Institute and the Digital
Transformation of Social Justice Work in the Twenty-First Century – Indigenous
Rights and Environmental Justice
 Justice as Morality, Morality as Justice: Cultivating a Moral Vision of Archival
Capabilities and Human Dignity
 Out of the Institutional Archive and on to the "Digital Streets": Restoring
Community Access to the Squatters' Collective Oral History Project
 The US Opioid Crisis through the Records Lens: Corporate Malfeasance and
Justice Seeking.
 The Archimedes Palimpsest, They Shall Not Grow Old and Shoah's Interactive
Holograms: Making Social Justice History Contemporary
 Recordkeeping for Menstrual Data: Privacy, Mobile App Analytics, and
Consent

From the end of World War II through the change in millennia intersections between the
evolution of the post-modern archive and the formation of post-modern historical discourses
intersected concerns for social justice within complex geo-political landscapes composed of
fractious post-colonial environments, Cold War interests, and often violent confrontations
(within western democracies) centering on demands for inclusion and plurality. In general, the
archive created precedent for the extension of Activisms around the world by incorporating new
forms of material remembrance that provided precedent for newly imagined forms of collective
memory. Indeed, while it may seem quaint today, archives struggled to preserve unprecedented
quantities of visual materials (both moving image and static) as well as new forms of manuscript
materials (mimeographs, Zines etc.) that in their day seemed dangerously ephemeral but were
absolutely essential to social justice movements. Further, the archivist had to imagine new ways
to engage new forms of civil rights actions and movements.
Scholars, archivists and activists today are confronted with similar challenges. Activist cultures
are now largely immaterial. Activist movements are often global in reach but shaped by
geographically specific cultures. The archivist today must assume new agencies to engage and
document social justice actions and movements. Indeed, the distinction between archivisms and
activisms is decidedly blurred.

Our volume seeks collaborative and international discussion among scholars (from a breadth of
interests), as well as activists and archivists to engage the tremendous challenges that threaten
the historicity of 21 st century social justice movements around the world.
We are especially interested in 6 categories of research.
1) What distinguishes 21 st century social justice actions from 20 th century activisms? What
unities and agencies remain consistent among movements including Occupy, The Arab
Spring, and BLM?
2) Has the evolution in the very nature of social justice advanced expectations of the
archivist? Must the 21 st century archivists assume activist agencies? Might 21 st century
archivists require sensitivities (perhaps training) that is additional to 20 th century models?
3) What will distinguish a 21st century social justice archive from its 20 th century
counterparts? It would seem that the very core of archival practice will require careful
revaluation in new and unique 21 st century contexts.
4) Certainly, we are experiencing an unprecedented loss of faith in authenticity – a troubling
advent for the archive. How will records produced within complex 21 st century digital
matrices assume accustomed authority (based on their authenticity). These are concerns
that were vastly limited within the scope and reach of material world.
5) From a most contemporary point of view, we will want to consider the tensions between
recent political evolutions and assumptions about the very nature of private information
specifically and who controls information that is intended to hold government
accountable more generally.
6) Finally, we are looking for a broad international perspective. The examples of 21st
century social justice referenced above (Occupy, Arab Spring, and BLM) are definitively
international in their reach. How might the experience of these previous revolutionary
actions inform approaches to documenting more contemporary social dispensation. We
are especially interested in perspectives from activists and archivists from around the
world.
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