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- Convenors:
-
Dan Kabella
(University of California, San Francisco)
Jason Chernesky (Johns Hopkins University)
Kelly Knight (UCSF)
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- Discussants:
-
Kelly Knight
(UCSF)
Dan Kabella (University of California, San Francisco)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the processes, opportunities and tensions that arise when open archives and the publics they serve co-create knowledge and value through community engagement practices. We engage with scholars working as, for and with communities on archives and the decolonization of knowledge.
Long Abstract:
In this panel we pose the following questions: (1) How should public archives co-facilitate relational accountability with the publics they serve? (2) How do tensions and opportunities emerge and circulate when both knowledge and value are co-created through the community engagement practices of open technoscientific archives? (3) How should opportunities and tensions be meaningfully addressed toward the goals of mutual aid and repair?
Participatory public knowledge infrastructures invite new modes of knowledge production from actors involved in the design and use of open archives. STS scholars conceive of archives as platforms for generative explorations into our knowledge economies and the imagined publics they enroll. Scholarship from feminist STS, anthropology and history introduce methodological approaches that interrogate the terms of engagement and processes of construction for shared archival labor that complicates notions of archives as neutral repositories of information. This labor offers the reanalysis of archival material but also constructs archives anew. Archival collaborators and archival technologies become part of a much larger iterative and reflexive techno-political exercise.
This panel engages broad epistemological and methodological themes concerning collaborative, community-centered, modes of knowledge production within archival assemblages. We invite scholars working as, for and with communities on archives across varied materialities, geographies and histories who recognize the fraught intersections of race, class and gender politics that determine how we locate the past and how we might co-design archival futures. Panel convenors focus work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a born-digital collection of internal documents from the opioid industry. Recognizing the enormous toll that the opioid crisis has taken on communities in the context of the United States’ racialized drug war policies, we explore critical questions related to the stakes of collaborative knowledge production and academic-community engagement.
We welcome various contribution formats, such as, papers, workshops, interactive formats, and other creative suggestions.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Jessica Lapp (University of Toronto)
Short abstract:
Exploring the challenges and opportunities inherent in the act of ‘doing feminist archiving,’ this paper considers how materials of feminist activism are shaped, used, and activated as evidence and memory over time across two distinct archival contexts.
Long abstract:
Exploring the challenges and opportunities inherent in the act of ‘doing feminist archiving,’ this paper considers how archival materials have been accumulated and made accessible in two community-centred archival contexts: Alternative Toronto, a digital community archive in Toronto, Ontario, and the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) Archives located in the Rubenstein Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Within the feminist activist archiving space, our understanding of the ‘collective experience’ is contingent on time-period, geography, and political motivation. The notion of ‘the collective’ in archives of feminist activism and struggle is a site of tension as individuated desire for documentation and validation is mitigated in favour of a shared feminist experience. This expression of collectivity shapes and informs records activation in unexpected ways.
Furthermore, the sticky boundaries between creating records and creating archives evident through the archival practices of Alternative Toronto and the ALFA Archives demonstrate that creating a record and creating an archive are entangled and at times inseparable creative acts. Most significantly, the act of creating an archive, of constituting a repository or distinct collection, can and often does exert the most powerful creative force on a body of records affecting how materials are encountered and used. This paper proposes that the deliberate feminist archival processes evident at Alternative Toronto and the ALFA Archives exert their own unique force on these collections and the wider systems of access and use that render these materials legible as evidence and memory over time.
Christoph Hanssmann (University of California, Davis)
Short abstract:
This presentation explores the difficulties of building and sharing archives on transgender health, science, and medicine in an era of increasingly anti-trans authoritarian politics. Drawing on digital and ethnographic data, it considers the challeges of information sharing across communities.
Long abstract:
In 2021, a group of transphobic reactionaries began targeting clinics in the United States that provide care to trans people. Clinics and the providers working in them received repeated threats of violence, bombing, or death. Reactionaries identified these sites of practice with a Google Map that was initially generated by a trans health activist to share clinics that offered informed consent-driven care to trans people. The repurposed map--which circulated among fundamentalist, white nationalist, MAGA, and “gender critical” groups--was initially shared by the self-described radical feminist group, Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF). This comprises one example of the ways in which efforts to produce sharable information about trans health, science, and medicine within communities of research, practice, and utilization has been appropriated by an increasingly organized reactionary coalition. These archives—often generated by trans people to improve formal or informal care networks within and for trans communities—are increasingly being mobilized against their intended purpose to justify restricted legislation, manufacture public consensus, or agitate reactionary violence against trans people. Given that transgender health, science, and medicine have long been a site of struggle, how do trans health proponents navigate new and increasingly authoritarian opponents to their care and flourishing? The paper draws on data from digital ethnography and interviews with providers and activists in the United States and Argentina to investigate the limits and possibilities of information-sharing in an emerging epoch of anti-trans fascist politics.
Dorie Apollonio (University of California San Francisco)
Short abstract:
This study considers how to balance potentially competing objectives of rapidly processing new information while challenging underlying negative assumptions about communities at risk that contributed to the opioid epidemic.
Long abstract:
The UCSF Opioids Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) contains internal corporate documents released in litigation, and was intended to generate new knowledge regarding the opioid epidemic that could identify structural factors underlying it and motivate changes in clinical practice and policy to prevent future public health harms. As of June 2023, OIDA had expanded to over 3 million documents, in the process creating an archive potentially “too numerous to be processed by human minds.” In past industry documents research in smaller archives, identifying relevant documents began with searches on key terms and proceeded with snowball searches, in which an initial keyword search is used to identify new relevant keywords. AI guided search methods have been proposed as an alternative strategy to review the large volume of documents contained in OIDA. However archivists have cautioned that AI guided search methods are not sufficiently sophisticated to completely replace human review, in part because they may reify underlying human biases. For example, authors of documents have referred to historically excluded groups in ways that are dismissive and harmful; including identifying sexual and gender minorities as “scum” (tobacco) and suggesting that women enjoy “Tupperware parties” (opioids). This study considers how to balance potentially competing objectives of rapidly processing new information while challenging underlying negative assumptions about communities at risk that contributed to the opioid epidemic. It calls for a reflective role for researchers and engagement with impacted communities in conducting research using these archival materials.
Tim Schuetz (University of California, Irvine)
Long abstract:
In the aftermath of a 2016 Formosa Plastics toxics disaster in coastal Vietnam (which ruined miles of coastline), advocates for victims are striving to hold both the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics conglomerate and the Vietnamese state accountable. This advocacy is supported by a global coalition of advocates in communities where Formosa Plastic operates. One tactic involves the use of digital archives to construct a body of evidence demonstrating Formosa’s environmental and health harms in many different settings. In this talk, I will reflect on the double binds and design challenges I've encountered while developing these archives on the Disaster-STS Network, an instance of the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE). I argue that a key strength of this form of lively archiving is in its production of better understanding of how data ideologies and infrastructures shape advocacy work, in turn shaping the kind of open archives that need to be designed for the future.
Margaux Fisher (University of California, Irvine)
Long abstract:
The links between environmental hazards, disease and inequality are often dismissed to preserve business interests. This erasure is made possible by data divergence—inconsistencies between data sets or between a data set and the realities it purports to represent. These inconsistencies range from missing or “undone” (i.e., incomplete or ignored) data (Frickel et al. 2007) to the selection of different priorities by institutional silos. A recognition that systems and structures impact health draws community advocates and scholars to the promise of archives as tools for making visible the relationship between environmental hazards, inequality and health. In this talk, I share my experiences of using the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) to conduct engaged research by building collaborative ethnographic archives. Drawing from our collaborations with environmental justice and health equity advocates, I discuss the role of archives in rendering data meaningful across social and scientific communities, and mobilizing stakeholders by gathering expertise from across disciplinary fields and institutional silos. I show how, in the face of routine government inaction, advocates and scholars use archives as tools to recollect the politics of health as they are and as they could be imagined otherwise.