UCLA Community Archives Lab envisions:
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- A world where independent community archives are fully funded and supported to do their important work.
- An archival praxis that fully reflects the many liberatory theories and practices that already exist in communities.
- A society in which traces of the past are used to acknowledge, disrupt, end and repair historic and ongoing harm.
We do this by:
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- Conducting transformative research that reconceptualizes dominant Western archival studies alongside, in collaboration with, and in support of independent community archives.
- Teaching and training a new generation of professional archivists in community-engaged and liberatory theories and practices.
- Supporting the autonomy of community archives through active and collaborative memory work.
- Centering memory work in envisioning and enacting a more equitable and just world.
What are community archives?
Community archives are independent memory organizations emerging from and coalescing around vulnerable communities, past and present.
What is liberatory memory work?
Liberatory memory work empowers vulnerable communities to enact their own temporalities, to represent themselves autonomously, and to activate records to redistribute material resources more equitably. Liberatory memory work recognizes and leverages the power of emotion to challenge and transform existing knowledge systems; such memory work simultaneously dismantles oppressive archives and imagines and strives toward liberatory practices. What is at stake, ultimately, is not just how we remember the past, but how we distribute power in the present.
Internships
Since 2018, the UCLA Community Archives Lab has run a paid community archives internship program for second-year MLIS students with support from the Mellon Foundation. In 2024, we expanded this program through the establishment of Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS), a collaborative of faculty from nine universities in the U.S. and Canada. With support from the Mellon Foundation, FOCAS transforms archival studies by administering paid internships at community archives, implementing curricular development, providing offsets costs for community archives, and supporting student participation in conferences and professional associations. You can read more about this exciting new work in the SEIS newsroom. FOCAS collectively authored this article.
Research
The UCLA Community Archives Lab was commissioned by the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) (add website) to write two reports about the state of BIPOC-Centered Arts Organizations’ Archival Practices and Needs, thanks to support from the Wallace Foundation. The Survey Report and the qualitative report, “No More Basements,” are now freely available on the SAADA site.
The UCLA Community Archives Lab is wrapping up “Virtual Belonging,” a 4-year partnership with the Texas After Violence Project, and the South Asian American Digital Archive, Funded by an IMLS grant, the project enables our faculty and students to conduct empirical research and develop tools to assess digital technologies’ affective impact on the creation of records documenting minoritized communities. This project addresses many of the emerging needs of community archives, especially the growing recognition of the need to mitigate potential harms for record creators and users, and the growing dependence on digital technologies across the archives, museum, and library and information science fields in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtual Belonging as resulted in several publicly accessible peer-reviewed articles, including:
““It Was as Much for Me As for Anybody Else”: The Creation of Self-Validating Records,” https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1189&context=jcas;
‘We Bounce Off Each Other’s Vibe’: The Importance of Symmetrical Intersubjectivity between Interviewer and Narrator https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00940798.2024.2316904
“Digital Feminist Care Ethics”
We are also delighted to provide access to the white paper, “‘Come Correct or Don’t Come at All:’ Building More Equitable Relationships Between Archival Studies Scholars and Community Archives” by the Reciprocity in Researching Records Collaborative.