Marika Cifor

“To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives1

Abstract Although much published work assumes that independent community archives have an important impact on communities, little research has been done to assess this impact empirically. This arti...

‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation

Abstract Through data gleaned from semi-structured interviews with 17 community archives founders, volunteers and staff at 12 sites in Southern California, this paper develops a new tripartite framework for understanding the ontological, epistemological and social impact of community archives. Throughout, it reflects the ways in which communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender and political position experience both the profoundly negative affective consequences of absence and misrepresentation in mainstream media and archives (which it calls ‘symbolic annihilation’) and the positive effect of complex and autonomous forms of representation in community-driven archives (which it terms ‘representational belonging’).

Aligning Bodies: Collecting, Arranging, and Describing Hatred for a Critical Queer Archives

Abstract: This conceptual paper frames hatred as an organizing principle—a central premise from which other materials by proximity derive classification, arrangement, and value—of LGBTQ archives and collections. Recognizing hatred as such points to the need to build queer and critical archives, and to develop archival practices that reflect the experiences and desires and meet the needs of LGBTQ individuals and communities. Examining the arrangement and description of hate mail and messages, archival collecting around hate crimes, and documenting and describing queer and trans self-hatred demonstrates that hatred is a useful lens for examining and deconstructing normative power and its affective circulations and structures. Naming hatred as an organizing principle is key to developing new queer and critical ways of thinking about how to be ethically and politically engaged on behalf of queer and other marginalized knowledge-formations and communities, and new ways of acting on those concepts in archival practice.

Stains and Remains: Liveliness, Materiality, and the Archival Lives of Queer Bodies

ABSTRACT This article places itself at the centre of a complex debate between scholars of new materialism and feminist theory. Feminist scholarship has been forcefully critiqued by new materialists for its ‘flight from the material’ that may have foreclosed vital attention to ‘lived material bodies and evolving corporeal practices’ [Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2009. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material Feminism, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1–20. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 3]. Through my own encounters with bodily remains and stains in LGBTQ archives, I develop the lens of liveliness to argue that such bodily matter animates and is animated because of its archival context. Liveliness offers a novel approach to new materialism as a productive means for feminist scholars to articulate how matter itself, including bodily matter, is animate and imbued with a particular kind of vitality and affective force. Approaching these archival records as lively emphasises how feminist scholarly research and practice in archives can be guided by and interrelated with the materiality of the bodies, objects, and spaces that constitute them. Liveliness in turn illustrates how archives themselves are vigorous and changeable.

Developing an undergraduate information studies curriculum in support of social justice

Through a review of the current state of Library and Information Studies (LIS) undergraduate education and the orientation of sample programs at consortium member iSchools, this article proposes an alternative pedagogical model that foregrounds the integration of a critical, social justice framework into undergraduate curricula. Based on an initial study conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) by the authors and other participants of the Winter/Spring 2015 Teacher Training Seminar, this essay, in addition to positing an approach towards the building of critically engaged undergraduate curriculum, moreover highlights the increasing need and support for LIS students and professionals that have a nuanced information praxis. Inspired by UCLA’s own commitment to a social justice orientation, the authors also point towards existing advocacy for social justice in LIS undergraduate education in the field and professional literature. In turn, underscoring the broader movement for a critical education and practice within LIS.