Eira Tansey

No one owes their trauma to archivists, or, the commodification of contemporaneous collecting

As the pandemic began to unfold, I’ve noticed that some archivists and historians urged people to keep a journal or record some real time thoughts about the pandemic for future generations/the historical record/etc. This started weirding me out for reasons I had difficulty articulating, and I began writing this blog post almost 3 months ago to process my thoughts.¹ 

As the story of the pandemic is shifting to the mass protests against police violence prompted by the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, I’m also seeing some similar rushes  (though far fewer than with COVID-19, for important reasons I’ll share below) to document this latest round of unsettling and trauma-laden news.

Fellow archivists, it’s time for us to look at whether some of these contemporaneous collecting projects, even if they are well-intentioned, are simply the newest form of archival commodification.

SOME BACKGROUND

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, many institutional archives publicly encouraged their community members to collect their own documentation (photos, social media posts, diaries, recordings, etc) about how they were experiencing the pandemic and share it with the archives. There are so many of these projects that there is now an 11-page document listing them.² 

A “send us documentation of how you’re experiencing this moment!” project allows archivists to maintain some semblance of normality and relevance (“our work still matters even when the world is falling apart! Look how little documentation survived from the 1918 pandemic!”). But I also think that this stance betrays a certain form of vocational awe (please read Fobazi Ettarh’s work on this if you aren’t familiar with the concept). From those I’ve spoken with who’ve organized COVID collecting projects, the experience seems to be varied in terms of how many submissions have been received (ranging from zero to more than anticipated). 

We’re now a week into mass protests across the United States against police violence. So far there has not been quite the same public rush of archivists to document this compared with COVID-19… yet (I think things could majorly change in the next several days). I believe that the major difference is because many Black archivists including (but not limited to) Jessica Ballard, Dorothy Berry, Micha Broadnax, Aleia Brown, Jarrett Drake, Meredith Evans, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, Bergis Jules, Jes Neal, Chaitra Powell, Holly Smith, and Stacie Williams have led the way by spending years arguing for and building frameworks around the ethics of documentation around Black-led activism and historical struggle. 

Several of these efforts began after Ferguson (though it’s important to recognize that Black archivists have spent decades creating archival spaces and projects representing Black life), with projects like Documenting the Now, Archiving Police Violence, Project STAND (Student Activism Now Documented), Archives For Black Lives Philadelphia, and the Blackivists. This has been an uphill battle in a profession that is white-dominated and with a long track record of overt hostility to Black archivists. It is to the credit of their work that I think many archivists are (I hope) pausing to figure out if there is a better approach to take right now that centers documentation ethics and the real needs of Black people living in their community, than a mad rush to collect things for the sake of feeling like we need to respond right away.

And even so – there are archivists and administrators among the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) world who haven’t gotten the message yet. Last Sunday, Jason Scott of the Internet Archive tweeted out that if anyone had protest footage, they could upload it to archive.org. Several archivists pushed back (a few examples), noting this was a really bad idea from the standpoint of protecting protesters, and highlighting the importance of following the lead of organizations like Documenting the Now and Witness. 

THE DOCUMENTATION OF TRAUMA

There is something really unsettling about archivists, particularly those from institutions which don’t have a great track record of supporting their most marginalized workers or constituents, suggesting that the historical record should be a high priority while people are trying to keep their shit together and attempt to not die. Furthermore, archivists themselves aren’t somehow isolated from experiencing traumatic events that the rest of the community is experiencing.

My first visceral experience of how archivists navigate trauma they themselves have been through was my experience living and working in post-Katrina New Orleans. I moved to New Orleans in 2008, just weeks before the first mandatory evacuation after Katrina. My roommate at the time had actually been through Katrina, and she evacuated long before I did because it triggered something that I now realize was probably a form of PTSD.

The archive I worked at between 2008-2013 was not involved in any attempts to actively document the post-Katrina history of New Orleans while I was there. While some of it was related to dealing with the recovery of flooded materials, limited resources, and collection policies,given the similar stances of many archives in town at that time, I think there was a deep fatigue around the expectation of telling and re-telling Katrina stories to outsiders. It was as if the stories of trauma had become a commodity for outsiders to consume every time hurricane season rolled around or a new anniversary took place. 

I remember this most clearly when SAA came to New Orleans in 2013. There was some expectation from the program committee that the local arrangements committee would put together some material telling the narrative that outsiders so badly wanted to believe of “Devastation to Revival.” Of course, anyone who knows New Orleans’ history and recent past knows that this is not a clean or easy story because New Orleans is not a city that fits well into any US historical narratives. I have very vivid memories of local arrangements committee meetings in which archivists who had been through Katrina felt deep resentment at the idea that their stories and the collective experience of New Orleans was material for consumption by other archivists there for an annual conference, and that many of them no longer wanted to talk about their trauma, because at that point it had become something for outsiders rather than something for themselves.

Of course, we all experience trauma differently, and I don’t mean to represent this example as universal for all archivists working in New Orleans during Katrina and its aftermath, or even indicative of how a similar situation would unfold today. But if so many archivists felt this way about sharing their trauma with other archivists, then why the hell would we expect non-archivists to be quick to share their trauma with archivists?

I sometimes encounter archivists who seem to have this cultural expectation that we are entitled to people’s trauma in the service of constructing a comprehensive historical record, despite the fact that few of us have any meaningful training in trauma-informed practice. This is incredibly fucked up, and it is an impulse we really need to re-examine. Not everyone processes trauma the same way, and where one person may find a great sense of relief in sharing their stories, another person may find that their trauma is reactivated. For years, archivists have argued that because of our resource restrictions, we cannot accept every donation of archival material or schedule every group of records to be transferred to the archives. Why then, do we increasingly feel the need to go out and document every traumatic event that comes along?   

Archivists have an ethical obligation to understand that respecting people’s privacy and right to forget their own past means accepting that we will lose parts of the historical record that others may wish we had gone to great lengths to get. When I first met my husband I would occasionally needle him about trying to get stories out of his elderly grandmother who fled Europe as antisemitism swept through it. To his credit, he refused to do so because he knew her way better than me. She passed away over a year ago, and while we never heard stories directly from her, we have since heard some stories passed down from his mother. It has been a lesson in trusting that unrecorded history will sometimes still be there even if you think you’ve lost your chances at recovering it.

Turning back to contemporaneous collecting projects: Consider that those who will be suffering the most from the pandemic or police brutality, or have the greatest frontline views to current events (such as healthcare workers or organizers) will have the least time, energy, and ability to create a full documentary record of what’s going on as it unfolds. Will the contemporaneous  collecting projects of white-dominated institutions simply acquire the materials of well-off people who remain on the literal or metaphorical sidelines? What does it actually mean to document a pandemic if you’re not documenting the reality, an unfurling horror show of death that has disproportionately affected the elderly, prisoners, poor people, and people of color? How do you archive a phenomenon when the people it affects the most are the least likely to be in the archive in the first place? Do we have the contacts in the most impacted communities to actually acquire documentation showing the true human costs of these collective experiences of trauma? If the answer is “we’ll do oral histories when things calm down,” consider too that people who lost the most or were on the frontlines may be extremely vulnerable to retraumatization if we attempt to document this pandemic without training in trauma-informed interviewing and oral history skills.  

And if you’re documenting protest activities that could include depictions of property damage or bodily violence……. what is the plan for when law enforcement tries to subpoena your material for investigations? This is not hypothetical. If you don’t have a plan for how to protect the people whose documentation you are collecting, then you should never collect it in the first place. 

Many archivists have written extensively about trauma, community documentation, and archives, so I’d refer anyone who is interested in learning more to read through the work of the archivists and organizations linked above. There is also an extensive peer-reviewed literature on these topics – again, far more than I could ever link to, but you can start with: survivor-centered approaches to documenting human rights abuses in community archives, secondary trauma among archivists, and the role of archival records in colonialist-inflicted trauma. 

THE MANUSCRIPTS TRADITION VS THE PUBLIC RECORDS TRADITION

Here’s where I want to lodge a major critique that I haven’t seen raised against contemporaneous collecting activities by archivists who work within white-dominated long-established GLAM institutions: many of these projects function as a renewal of the historical manuscripts tradition. These projects make us feel like we’re doing something relevant and signal that we care about what our community is experiencing. It’s meant as a bulwark against our own anxiety about the ephemerality of records created in social media and on cell phones. These projects provide our administrators with feel good press releases so they can somehow show that we’re responding to societal concerns, but without actually requiring any accountability or significant resource allocation on the part of the institution itself.³

Many of these projects run the risk of giving us a false sense of relevance. Because one of the most overlooked but important things that archivists working in hegemonic institutions can do is to ensure the acquisition, preservation, and accessibility of the very records that hold that institution accountable to its constituents. One of the most profound reference experiences I’ve had in the last few years was when student activists were trying to confirm a rumor they’d heard about a past university president’s stated commitment to increasing resources for a previous generation of Black students. They were able to integrate that information they found in the university’s archives into the new set of demands they were issuing, recognizing that this was not the first time our institution had failed to meet their needs, and with the documentation to back up their argument. 

I think what we have is the re-emergence of a new set of battle lines within archival discourse between the historical manuscripts tradition (i.e., collecting external materials that are then brought in and housed at the institution) versus the public records tradition (i.e., ensuring that the records of the institution itself are preserved). I think that much of the social justice discourse within the US archives profession has found its comfortable home within a framework of collecting external materials as a counterbalance against institutional narratives. But the problem is that we’ve neglected to stay engaged with the vast social justice implications of institutional records that are not well-managed. 

Working with institutional records can be profoundly challenging work, because it means trying to get the records that cast institutions themselves in a bad light. No one has ever courted a donor on the premise of “We need to fund the university archivist because last year she helped a journalist research how the Board in 1995 knew all about the Famous Public Intellectual who quietly resigned and now is the subject of the latest Me Too scandal.” It means constantly feeling frustrated with many of the top figures of your institution who may be reluctant or resistant to transfer records to the archives, in case those persistent student activists come by to do some research. And as a result, many institutions end up with archival silences that can be traced back directly to the difficulty of getting the records that would hold our own institution accountable. But if institutional archivists don’t do this – who else will do that work?

ARCHIVAL ETHICS > MAKING ADMINISTRATORS LOOK GOOD

Archivists at long-established historically white GLAM institutions: if you’re feeling compelled to rush in and document things, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Are you fully prepared to follow all of the best practices for documenting in times of crisis? Is there a community archive independent of your institution that is better positioned to document what’s happening because they are led by and have the trust of marginalized communities? If this is a rush to document high-visibility activism in the form of public protests, and all you can think of is grabbing a bunch of videos off YouTube or Twitter or putting out a press release instead of building relationships with organizers first, maybe sit with why you feel that way. And why you haven’t built those relationships in the last few years.

If you are being pressured from your administrators to document things as they unfold and you don’t have the resources, staffing, or ability to adhere to ethical guidelines to do so, resist these unrealistic expectations until your administrators provide you with the resources to do your job. 

Finally – one of the biggest elephants in the room right now is that budgets are being slashed at virtually every GLAM institution. There are already lists tracking archivist layoffs, librarian layoffs, and museum staff layoffs. Most GLAM institutions, particularly those dependent on public money or smaller institutions, did not fully recover from the 2008-2009 recession. Even archivists I know at well-resourced, fancy pants institutions with far more staff than my own,  regularly tell me how overworked and overwhelmed they’ve been for years. This is particularly true of those dealing with the less sexy work of institutional records that are so critical to the process of institutional accountability. 

If we felt this way in the Before Times, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say the best thing archivists can organize right now is not whatever handful of donated diaries we can coax out of the people who read our institution’s blog. The most important organizing right now is to organize the hell out of our institutions and profession to demand a world with far fewer billionaires, athletics coaches, six-figure salaried university administrators, cops, CEOs, and galas to make big donors feel good about themselves, and actually hire more permanent and well-compensated archivists to do the work we need for the future we deserve. 

1. This critique is not a specific critique directed at anyone in particular. Please don’t think this is about any archivist I do or don’t know, because I promise you, it’s not. When I think specific people screw up enough to merit public discussion, I have the integrity to actually name who I’m talking about.
2. The full extent of my own recent contemporaneous collecting (and I use the word collecting with hesitation because these are university records) is that I’ve been crawling my university’s COVID-19 webpages for our web archives and gathering up many of the official email communications.
3. I know that there are many examples of collecting projects done jointly with institutions and community groups in which resource allocation, community-led leadership, and post-custodial models are very real and meaningful. Unfortunately those projects seem to be the exception rather than the norm. This critique is not about those projects.
   

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Categorised as: archivists