Reminder of an upcoming talk next week on February 5th!
Please join us for the first online talk of 2025 from the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) Crisis, Disaster, and Tragedy Response Working Group (CDTRWG).
CDTRWG maintains and updates SAA's Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit; develops and provides immediate and ongoing resources and response assistance to archivists, allied cultural heritage professionals, and their communities in times of tragedies, disasters, or other crises; and builds partnerships with organizations focused on relief efforts and cultural stewardship and preservation. As part of that partnership building, we are conducting a series of public talks in 2023 to hear about related work.
Planning for Love: Towards a Theory and Praxis of "Institutional Love" in Archives
Dr Jennifer Douglas, University of British Columbia
Wednesday, February 5th, 2025, 10am PST (1pm EST; 6pm GMT)
RSVP: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMtcOyhqT4jHtRKMh3NGZXrbb7FLea4xw05#/registration
Summary
This talk will draw on Dr. Jennifer Douglas' research about grieving and recordkeeping with both bereaved records creators and practicing archivists, as well as on the expanding critical literature on trauma-informed archival praxis and affect and emotions in archival work to consider what institutional love might look like in archival repositories, sketch the transformative work necessary to achieve it, and argue for its prioritization in the face of current social, cultural, fiscal and environmental pressures on archival institutions. This exploration will be grounded in a critical reading of discourses of love, care and affect as they have been deployed in archival theory over the last several years, as well as in the broader critical literature on feminist love studies and feminist care ethics. The talk attempts to bring these different focuses together to propose a theory of critical archival care that can inform the development of institutional love as praxis for the archival discipline and profession.
Biography
Jennifer Douglas (she/her) is an associate professor in the Master of Archival Studies program at the School of Information, University of British Columbia, where she teaches courses on arrangement and description and personal and community archives. Her research has focused on the roles of recordkeeping and archive making in the intimate lives of individuals and communities and archivists' responsibilities to represent, support and make space for these roles. Her research on griefwork in archives and on creators and care has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She is co-lead of Community Archives Collecting and Heritage Exhibitions (CACHE), a stream in the UBC Research Excellence Cluster Creating Better Community-Engaged Asian Canadian Research, and is lead for the UBC team of Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS), funded by the Mellon Public Knowledge Program. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
A recording of the talk will be available on the CDTRWG's website shortly after the event.
Best wishes,
Becky Tinker (she/her)
Archives Assistant
Irving Gilmore Music Library
Rebecca.tinker@yale.edu
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Rebecca Tinker
Archives Assistant/Archival Data Associate
Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University
New Haven CT
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