Reparative Acts and the Caste of Archival Erasure
About the talk
As libraries, archives, and museums strive to be welcoming to all people, they are confronting bias and subsequent harm in how cultural heritage materials have been collected, described, and shared. Whose stories are told? Whose stories are marginalized? Whose stories are misrepresented or silenced? Reparative archiving is one approach by which we might find solutions to the bias and limits of the archive and begin to repair the ruptures and past harms.
As our guest speaker, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, Associate Director of Engagement, Inclusion, and Reparative Archiving in Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland has written, “the building of a reparative archive via acquisition, advocacy, and utilization can assist in decolonizing traditional archives and bringing historically oppressed voices in from the margins.” Please join the University of Chicago Library, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity to learn about social justice through reparative archival praxis.
Event Details
- Title: Reparative Acts and the Caste of Archival Erasure
- Speaker: Lae’l Hughes-Watkins
- When: March 27, 2024 10:00-12:00pm
- Where: Hybrid - Regenstein Library room 122 and Zoom
- This event will be closed captioned. To request other accommodations, please contact adrianho@uchicago.edu as soon as possible.
Please register:
Open to the community
We are excited to extend the conversation outside of the campus community to the public. The Library is happy to welcome anyone that wants to learn more about Reparative Archiving and its connection to creating more inclusive spaces for marginalized voices to share, see, and honor their stories and history.
About the speaker
Lae’l Hughes-Watkins is the Associate Director for Engagement, Inclusion, and Reparative Archiving in the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland. She is also a researcher, educator, and advocate for social justice, equity, and inclusive archives, and the founder of Project STAND. She recently published a paper titled: "Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices"
She is the Founder of Project STAND, a radical grassroots archival consortia project between colleges and universities around the country; to create a centralized digital space highlighting analog and digital collections emphasizing student activism in marginalized communities. Project STAND aims to foster ethical documentation of contemporary and past social justice movements in underdocumented student populations. STAND advocates for collections by collaborating with educators to provide pedagogical support, create digital resources, hosts workshops and forums for students, information professionals, academics, technologists, humanists, etc. interested in building communities with student organizers and their allies, leading to sustainable relationships, and inclusive physical and digital spaces of accountability, diversity, and equity. The project has received over $800,000 in grant funding from The Mellon Foundation and IMLS.
She is also the Associate Director of Engagement, Inclusion, and Reparative Archives in Special Collections and University Archives, a newly established position for the University of Maryland in College Park. Hughes-Watkins is also the architect of the reparative archive framework, mentioned in her article, "Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices." She has launched workshops that focus on this archival praxis, which centers on community building as a first step. Her research areas focus on outreach to marginalized communities, documenting student activism within disenfranchised student populations, and utilizing narratives of vulnerable populations within the curricula of post-secondary education spaces.
She also serves as a Co-chair for the 1856 Project, a chapter of Universities Studying Slavery, and the Co-PI for the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American and African Studies grant. From 2013-2018 she served as the University Archivist at Kent State University. She is a 2019 Mover and Shaker. She is a 2019 ARL Leadership and Career Development Program fellow. She also has a recently published chapter in the upcoming book "Archives: Power, Truth, Fiction," editors Andrew Prescot and Allison Wiggins, printed by Oxford Press.
