This week’s readings emphasizes ethical considerations when engaging with histories and archives of marginalized communities and navigating collections rooted in colonialism. Anderson points out in “Towards Slow Archives”, “the history of collection is the history of colonialism”. The colonial lens is evidenced in the history of violent dispossession, exploitation, and erasure of indigenous culture.
Johnson’s discussion of the legacy of commodifying Black data argues against the spectacularizing of the horrific violence on Black bodies and proposes black digital practice as a way of challenging the problematic narrative. In the video, Cotera poses a similar argument in favor of the Chicano community retaining ownership of the archives primarily composed of their oral histories and archival documents.
Cotera challenges our notion of archives by positioning the domestic spaces occupied by the Chicano women as archives and the women as knowledge repositories. Cotera and her students worked to slowly build trust with the community of women contributing to the collection and the value of the relationships is evident in the collection design. Access to the resultant collection of Chicano feminist history is restricted through login requirements and scholars/ students/ users engaging with the archives are expected to obtain permission from the rightsholder—the Chicano women. Cotera admits that enforcement might not be practically possible and the system largely relies on ethical, responsible behavior from the users.
The painstaking approach to building and managing the collection is mirrored in the “slow archive” process (Anderson) that suggests slowing down to refocus archival practices to reflect indigenous temporalities and hold communal relationships at the heart to the process. The objective is to find safe spaces to share within the community and cites the example of Mukurtu CMS, a community digital access platform that utilizes Traditional Knowledge labels to provide cultural context and exercise control over access. Another initiative discussed is Local Contexts that works to reclaim intellectual property power structures and legitimize indigenous governance frameworks for decision making around ownership and access to cultural heritage collections.
Carrying forward the line of inquiry on online interventions, Johnson’s advocacy of social media as a tool for cultural critique and creation of online communities finds a common thread in the BLM movement’s online organization of activism efforts for social justice. “Beyond the Hashtags” report shows how digital tools provided a platform for oppressed voices to reach a wider audience and how BLM succeeded in engaging productively with the policymakers, media and the general public. The culmination of the discussions on knowledge production and ethical approaches to culturally sensitive archives was the initiative ”Possibly Impossible Research Project” that shares the benefits students and the scholarly community could derive from designing research assignments that contribute to a larger objective and allow emerging scholars to engage early in their academic journey with primary sources.
