colloquia
“Sexuality’s Abundance: Towards a Poetics of the Archive”
“Recovering Borderland Modernism: Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo and El Paso’s Spanish-Language Print Culture”
When
1 p.m. to 2 p.m. April 23, 2020
Bio: Jennifer Douglas lives and works on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people. She is an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, where she teaches courses on personal and community archives and archival representation. Her current research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, explores the relationship between recordkeeping and griefwork through archival research and interviews with records creators and keepers.
Abstract: This talk will present findings of an ongoing research project “Conceptualizing Recordkeeping as Grief Work: Implications for Archival Theory and Practice.” Through research in archives created by the bereaved as well as in-depth interviews with bereaved parents about their recordkeeping practices, this project explores the roles that record creating and keeping can play in the processes of grief and bereavement. Introducing three key concepts – grief work, the continuing bonds model of grieving, and continuing social existence – that inform the study, the talk will focus on how the bereaved parents interviewed talked about records and grief work. I will discuss how a focus on grief work brings to light many non-traditional types of records, and explore how the bereaved describe what they do with records and what records do for them. Situating recordkeeping as a mode of grief work can inform – and possibly transform – the way that archivists understand their relationships to records, to records creators, to donors and to researchers. Seeing recordkeeping through a grief work lens, this talk will argue, challenges archivists to consider the making and keeping of records as an act of love and requires an approach to archival work as a concomitant act of care.
Bio: Amelia Acker is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the School of Information, where she leads the Critical dada Studies Lab. Her research on data archives and preservation has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Acker's current research focuses on cultures of mobile computing, emerging digital preservation models, data literacy, data durability, and metadata standards for exchange between private and public archives. Previously, Acker worked as a librarian, an archivist, and a mobile app developer.
Abstract: In this talk I will present findings from following three teams of information professionals as they implemented emulation strategies in their day-to-day work at the technology lab. I will discuss different emulation practices for software preservation, research access, and exhibition undertaken by different teams in providing to access to software and software-dependent collections. By examining particular versions of access from different information institutions, these findings call into question software emulation as a single, static preservation strategy for cultural heritage institutions. Results suggest that these preservationists have developed different emulation practices for particular kinds of encounters in supporting different types of use and users. I will conclude the talk by discussing how these findings have significance for information institutions developing software emulation capacities to provide access, and share some comments for researchers studying the "invisible work" of software preservation and maintenance.
When
Noon to 2 p.m. Oct. 30, 2020
Bio: Marika Cifor is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. Her research investigates how individuals and communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV-status are represented and how they document and represent themselves and their social movements in archives and digital cultures. This multidisciplinary scholarship uncovers how archives and digital technologies, data, and cultures are shaping identities, experiences, and social movements. She holds PhD in Information Studies from UCLA and an MLIS from Simmons College.
Abstract: AIDS activists, advocacy organizations, physicians and medical researchers, and people living with HIV/AIDS have devoted vast energy and resources to finding a medical cure for HIV/AIDS. Now well into the fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, a medical cure remains elusive. Drawing from her book-in-progress, Viral Cultures: Activist Archives at the End of AIDS, Marika Cifor examines activist archiving as cure. Since 1994, Visual AIDS a community-based arts organization has documented, collected, preserved, and made accessible the records of artists living with HIV and estates of artists who have perished, in order to preserve and honor their legacies, and to expose and redress AIDS’ injustices. The holistic cure Visual AIDS demands is requisite to responding in kind to an epidemic that is and always has been political and cultural as much as biomedical. In this talk, Cifor analyzes the Archive Project’s curative efforts and their implications in three parts. First, examining the archives as a remedy for one kind of death, that of artistic career. Second, she turns to AIDS archiving as communal acts of critical care. Finally, she examines the archives as curing, preserving digitally to ensure long-term animation. The Archive Project and the Artist+ Registry, its digital archives counterpart, highlight the material and conceptual affordances of archiving as anti-AIDS activism. Its records and their nimble activation hold imaginative capacities for challenging persistent gendered, racialized, and classed discrimination and stigmatization faced by those living with HIV/AIDS. The archives’ work also demonstrates the conjoined limitations of art and activist archiving in meeting urgent needs and redressing harm. Despite such constraints, activist archiving can vitally engender survival.
When
2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 23, 2020
University of Washington Information School
Bio: Sandra Littletree is an Indigenous scholar, forever librarian, educator, daughter, and auntie. She is a descendent of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and is a citizen of the Navajo Nation (Diné). She is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Washington Information School. Her research interests lie at the intersections of Indigenous systems of knowledge and librarianship. She is a past president of the American Indian Library Association (AILA) and was the Program Manager of Knowledge River at the University of Arizona from 2009-2012. She currently lives in Olympia, WA, and is originally from the Four Corners region of New Mexico.
