Michelle Caswell - Imagining Archives Against Annihilation: Data, Theory, Practice

Abstract: In the 1970s, feminist communication scholars first proposed the term "symbolic annihilation" to describe the ways in which women are absent, underrepresented, or misrepresented in mainstream media. Taking this concept as a starting point, the first part of this talk will examine the ways in which mainstream archival practice has symbolically annihilated communities of color and LGBTQ communities through absence, underrepresentation, and misrepresentation. In the face of such symbolic annihilation, marginalized communities have formed their own independent community-based archives that empower them to establish, enact, and reflect on their presence in ways that are complex, meaningful, and substantive. Based on empirical interviews with dozens of community archives founders, staff, and users, Caswell will propose a tripartite structure for assessing the impact of such archives on the individuals and communities they serve: ontological impact (in which members of marginalized communities get confirmation "I am here"); epistemological impact (in which members of marginalized communities get confirmation "we were here"); and social impact (in which members of marginalized communities get confirmation "we belong here"). Moving from the empirical to the theoretical, Caswell will then examine the relationship between symbolic and actual annihilation. Symbolic annihilation both precedes and succeeds actual annihilation in that communities are rendered nonexistent, invisible, or expendable before they are subject to violence, and then, after violence, such acts are often rendered invisible or expunged from the record, magnifying and mimicking the violence itself. Finally, this talk will engage the speculative, ending with a provocation for archivists to "imagine otherwise," that is, to conceive of and build a world in which communities that have historically been and are currently being marginalized are fully empowered to represent their past, construct their present, and envision more just futures. 

Michelle Caswell, PhD, is an assistant professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where she also has a joint appointment in Asian American Studies. She is a recipient of an IMLS early career grant for her work on the affective impact of community archives. Her research examines the ways in which traces of the past are used to build more just futures, with an emphasis on formulating a critical archival studies. She is the author of the book Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than three dozen peer-reviewed articles. In 2014, she edited a special double issue of Archival Science on archives and human rights, and in 2017, she co-guest edited a special issue of The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies on critical archival studies. She holds a BA from Columbia University, a master's in theological studies focusing on South Asian religions from Harvard University, an MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a PhD in LIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive, an online repository that documents and provides access to the diverse stories of South Asian Americans.