The Lab’s “UCLA/Community Archives Internship Project” empowers local community archives in Southern California to hire 24 UCLA information studies graduate students to complete paid yearlong internships over the course of three years. Students are engaging in vital archival work documenting, appraising, describing, digitizing, and exhibiting community history, as needed by their host organization.
The “Assessing the Use of Community Archives” project examined the way Asian American, Latinx, and LGBTQ community archives in Southern California counter the absence or mis-portrayal (what feminist communication scholars have termed “symbolic annihilation”) of their communities in mainstream media and archives by providing both avenues for autonomous self-representation and politically generative future-oriented spaces for shaping collective memory.