Reparative Memories: Communities in Crisis and Archival Care

Crystal Baik
Gender & Sexuality Studies
UC Riverside

Thuy Vo Dang
Department of Information Studies
UC Los Angeles

Reparative Memories: Communities in Crisis and Archival Care is an interdisciplinary working group of humanities scholars, community archivists, librarians, and cultural memory workers across six UC campuses. Our work engages communities in crisis whose histories, memories, and cultural heritage are threatened by systemic violence (e.g. war and militarized colonial displacement; police violence and carceral surveillance; and settler state occupation and genocide). Through parallel tracks of discussion and programming informed by an ethic of care—including a yearlong seminar, site visits, and a public program series—our group addresses the following questions: what anticolonial, non-extractive methods of community archiving and memory mending emerge when infrastructure is destroyed or damaged? What creative and nimble forms of memory documentation and safeguarding crystallize among archivists, scholars, librarians, grassroots activists, seed-keepers, and artists under the gaze of carceral surveillance and state occupation? What role does archival imagination play in contexts where cultural heritage is endangered, and/or when cultural memory workers are banished or killed by the state? As scholars and memory workers committed to holding stories of catastrophic violence, how might we care for one another through the co-creation of spaces of learning and unlearning anchored in empathic listening and solidarity?

Image credit: Hendrik Zeitler, from The Archive’s Fold (Latipa, 2018).