Radical Empathy in Archival Practice

Hi there, Radical Empathy friends! We have been on hiatus in posting on this platform due to current Tumblr policies. However we have not yet migrated to another platform due to other priorities. That is all.

A few choice words and some incredible resources from our own Giordana Mecagni about how to do meaningful community engagement in libraries and archives. This post features a few our our favorite things: a bibliography, citations, a quote from Octavia Butler, reference to our patron saint adrienne maree brown (author of Emergent Strategy), and a mini-zine!

On Capacity and Care by Bethany Nowviskie, 2015

Berry, Dorothy, Kelly Bolding, Annie Tang, and Rachel E. Winston. “Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description of Marginalized Histories.” Papers presented at the SAA annual meeting, Washington, D.C., August 16, 2018, 

This bibliography is a list of resources illustrating radical empathy in archives, created by Jasmine Jones and Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez for their webinar on Applying Radical Empathy Framework in Archival Practice.

--Kelly

It all started with a panel of 9 archivists interested in talking about radical empathy in archival practice at the 2017 Society of American Archivists annual meeting after being inspired by the 2016 article by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor. In the article “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives" (Archivaria), Caswell and Cifor in which define radical empathy as "a willingness to be affected, to be shaped by another's experience, without blurring the lines between the self and the other." The authors identify archivists as caregivers whose responsibilities are not primarily bound to records but to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through "a web of mutual affective responsibility."

Celeste Brewer cites Caswell and Cifor’s article on radical empathy in writing about her decisions about describing an archival collection documenting the lives of Ben Duncan and Dick Chapman. (Archival Outlook, May/June 2018)

Via @prisonculture​ on Twitter: “It goes slowly. that's OK. it's slow work. You push. You move. Forward. It's OK. You do what you can. You do what is within your capacity. The important thing is to act. consistently. over time. with others.”

This piece by Ruth Kitchin Tillman looks at librarianship more broadly, however the section “The Ways We Treat Each Other” speaks to issues of empathy in our profession.

This is an excellent reflection on the original article that inspired this tumblr. In particular, the question: “How do ensure that we don’t feel so alone, and how do we make time for the hospitality essential to maintain radical empathy?”

Giordana Mecagni was interviewed about Radical Empathy in Archives for the New England Archivists Newsletter, and shared the text of the article on her website. We love seeing these ripples out into the community to build the conversation around these concepts. 

We invite authors from a variety of career experiences and archival practices (students, early career professionals, and colleagues working in community archives, public libraries, museums, non-profits, corporations, etc.) to contribute to this special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. This issue will provide an extended exploration of “how an archival ethics of care can be enacted in real world environments.” It will explicitly focus on case studies, in particular case studies that engage feminist theory and frameworks, relating to the lived experiences of practicing archivists.