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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
- Location:
- HG-15A16
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
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 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -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.
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.
Short abstract:
This paper explores the use of digital archives in advocating for accountability after a 2016 Formosa Plastics toxic disaster in coastal Vietnam, foregrounding how data ideologies shape both advocacy work, and the archives designed to document and support this work.
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.
Short abstract:
This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of building community archives to support and mobilize health equity stakeholders.
Long abstract:
In this paper, I share my experiences of using the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) to conduct engaged research in Louisiana by building ethnographic archives. I discuss the challenges of archiving for health equity in an anti-Black petrostate that not only privileges economic interests over public health through neoliberal management techniques but also often appropriates the tools of transparent governance and advocacy to police subaltern communities and the advocates working from/with them. Drawing from my collaboration with health equity advocates in Baton Rouge, I have approached these challenges by looking at “corollary records” (Caswell 2023) as tools for discerning the politics of health without revealing sensitive information. In Louisiana, the possibilities for “health otherwise” can be excavated in records of health professionals’ advocacy against market-based healthcare reforms.