Short Paper Sessions consist of three papers:

• Salma Abumeeiz: Building Community Archive Partnerships: Considerations, Pedagogies, and Cohort-Building around the Islamic Center of Southern California Community Archive
• Grace Handy: Refusal of Inclusion: Evading the Colonial Archive
• Alex H. Poole and Ashley Todd-Diaz: Unpacking the Graduate Archival Curriculum

Abstract

Building Community Archive Partnerships: Considerations, Pedagogies, and Cohort-Building around the Islamic Center of Southern California Community Archive

This presentation will highlight the dynamic cohort of academic staff, faculty, graduate students, and community practitioners that continue to coalesce around the budding Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC) Community Archive. Beginning in August 2020, librarians from the UCLA library began an informal partnership with community members from the ICSC as part of an ongoing effort to preserve, document, and make accessible the unique identity and history of the Center from its inception in 1953 to the present day. Since forging this partnership, the team has expanded to include faculty members and graduate students in the UCLA Department of Information Studies.

As a result of this expanded community of practice, the ICSC Community Archive has been embedded into two archival studies courses spanning 3 academic quarters. This curriculum-integration created meaningful archival projects for over 30 graduate students, which were completed in collaboration with ICSC community members, librarians, and IS faculty. Reflecting on the community of practice and student projects that emerged around the ICSC Community Archive, this presentation will:

1. highlight the importance of reciprocity and mutually-beneficial relationship building within community archival initiatives, particularly those that involve institutionally-based participants;
2. explore the pedagogical and cohort-building potential associated with community archival partnerships, while cautioning against “damaging tendencies in academic research, including: parachuting in, knowledge extraction … and transactional consent” (Caswell et. al., 2021, para. 1);
3. and, finally, illustrate community archival and self-documentation practices from a regionally-situated Muslim community, which has historically been under-served by the archival field.

Presenter Bio

Salma Abumeeiz, Research and Instruction Librarian, UCLA Library

Accessibility details

• AI captioning
• Alt text for images/posters

Recording

This presentation will be recorded and made available on AERI YouTube.

Abstract

Refusal of Inclusion: Evading the Colonial Archive

There are few discussions in archival theory about the agency of the colonized to avoid presence in the archive, but many on how archivists have purposefully ignored those marginalized and told an incomplete and biased story. This is certainly true, but included in this narrative is a solution of its own making: that only archives themselves have created those gaps and themselves can fill them in.

This presentation explores instances of intentional hiding in contrast to liberal demands for inclusivity and representation, building on the work of other scholars that focuses on the refusal of certain Indigenous groups and individuals to have their materials and stories archived in Canada’s National Center for Truth and Reconciliation and the Library and Archives Canada Multicultural Initiatives Office. This presentation reads such agency as a rejection of appropriation and incorporation into a settler colonial project, also analyzing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the U.S., an example of the demand for Indigenous sovereignty over their own materials using their own archival or anarchival practices. Drawing from the work of Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Dr. Karina Vernon, this intervention reads intentional refusal as resistance, contrary to the narrative of archival inclusion as liberatory.

Presenter Bio

Grace Handy, Queens College

Accessibility details

• AI captioning

Recording

This presentation will be recorded and made available on AERI YouTube for the duration of Virtual AERI 2022.

Abstract

Unpacking the Graduate Archival Curriculum

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded research project, “Exploring New Frontiers in 21st Century Archival Education,” explores the historical trajectory and current state of archival education; it seeks to build capacity in Master’s level archival pedagogy. As part of this research, the project team conducted semistructured interviews with 33 full-time tenure-track archives faculty listed in the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) Directory of Archival Education and an online survey (406 responses) of graduate students and new archival professionals (five years or fewer in the field).

The proposed paper will focus on the following research question: what is the current state of the graduate archival curriculum? This research question is undergirded by the following sub-questions: what do faculty and students think are the most important courses and course topics? What would faculty and students like to see added to the curriculum? How do faculty choose readings and assignments? What readings and assignments do students find or did they find most useful? How well do students believe they are being prepared or have been prepared for practice?

This paper will illuminate the commonalities and differences between the perspectives of current archival faculty, students, and recent graduates regarding the current state of graduate archival education—and implications for moving forward pedagogically in the 2020s.

Presenter Bio

Alex H. Poole, Drexel University

Ashley Todd-Diaz, Towson University

Accessibility details

• AI captioning

Recording
This presentation will be live-only.

Details

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Zoom details

Register in advance for this meeting: https://lsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIvc-qrrjkiGdLcPNZNXnLSwHOcWHYY493z

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Recording

Part of this session will be recorded and made available on AERI YouTube.