Archives and Institutional Power: A Critical Perspective
September 08, 2016
![](https://www.atla.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Adam-Paradis-e1473367918672.jpg)
Submitted by Adam Paradis, ATLA Metadata Librarian
Together with a panel of archivists and librarians, I presented at the Society of American Archivists 2016 Annual Conference to engage the topic of institutional power and the role of archives in perpetuating or underwriting such power.
Our goal was to interrogate the notions of institutional power, from abuses and misuses to the more benign, while trying to sketch the relations among power, archives, and so-called activism. We used a live polling technology to bring the audiences’ diverse viewpoints to bear on the discussion to work towards an understanding of activism as it relates to (or does not) to the production and maintenance of an archive.
As we went live, the purpose of the panel became three-fold: first, we wanted to maintain the ad-hoc tradition of archives professionals interrogating justice, social justice, and cluster of political activism and praxis at our annual professional gathering. Second, we wanted to gather three friendly archives people from three different archival situations to investigate these issues. Lastly, we wanted to make the discussion as horizontal and democratic as such a gathering may allow: we wanted to integrate the audience into our discussion, respond to the audience, and work together to question our topic. In this overview, I will address the latter two components, for they are more interesting and applicable to ATLA’s conference panels.
The participants of our panel were pulled from four different backgrounds: Terry Baxter is an archivist for the Multnomah County (Oregon) Records Program; Jessica Farrell is a digital collections curator for Harvard University’s Law Library, and a former archivist for McDonald’s; Dierdre Scaggs, our moderator, is Associate Dean, Special Collections Research Center; Director of the Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Research Center; and I, Adam Paradis, am a metadata librarian/indexer for ATLA, reference and instruction librarian for City Colleges of Chicago, and co-founder of the Fr. Michael L. Pfleger Archives here in Chicago. In a word, we were a motley bunch of public records, special collections, academic libraries, and grassroots archivists all coming together to investigate the following questions:
- What are the kinds of abuses of power that nonprofit and institutions of higher education commit?
- How do archives and archivists support these abuses?
- How do institutions use archives to either obscure or highlight abuses of power?
- How can an archivist be an activist while working in an abusive organization?
It must be noted that among the three panelists, we share a critical approach to the work and position of archives vis-a-vis power, institutions, and so on. It’s worth noting, too, that archives always exist in relation to an institution, indeed they are typically established by an institution, for which they are ancillary and dependent upon for a mission and records. The question of activism, then, turns into two questions: the question of this relation between records (their use, production, preservation, and so on) and the activities recorded; and the question of an-archival practices, what I would call important functions to produce a robust archives, but that may fall under ‘other duties’.
Jessica Ferrell summed this up well in her eleven points (forthcoming) under the title “Challenging Institutional Power,” which includes acting in solidarity with campus activities, walk outs, student movements, critical pedagogy, and information literacy, and refusing to accept the normalization of unpaid-internships on the grounds that “if it must be done with slave-like labor, then it doesn’t need to be done.”
Terry focused on the possibility of power, democracy, and accountability inherent in record keeping and public institutions. He demonstrated an important check on power and institutional overreach by the mere presence of archives. I instead focused on a re-construing a truly radical notion in archival collections: how do we, and should we, collect the undocumentable, the unrecordable, the truly marginalized — that is, those that do not leave even ephemera to be collected, such as the unemployed and the unemployable. These individuals are being left behind by documentation practices and becoming written out of the public record as a result of this. I think our panel was in part a success because we had three strong and nuanced yet critical views on these questions.
Perhaps most provocative was our demand on our audience. Not only did we want them to participate, we wanted them to collaborate with us on these questions during the presentation. Terry devised a poll everywhere program and had the audience write unique responses and down-vote or up-vote each other’s replies as we worked through our prepared remarks. The technology was valuable because we had the audience re-inscribing our points in advance, as it were, such that we could gloss over key points of agreement to address more particular issues. To have the audience contribute in real time (and making these data available as part of Jessica and Adam’s forthcoming publication) dismantled the dais in favor of something more akin to the exercise of democracy: moving forward we can, as participants in the profession, come together and hold the profession accountable in its inevitable relations to power.
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