Information Science Public Lectures

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Abstract:  We are honoured to host a Transatlantic Roundtable on Archives, Reparations and Black Liberation: Perspective from Haiti, Kenya, Jamaica and Ghana . Speaker titles and abstracts of each presentation are are follows:

• Dr. Stanley Griffith, Our Records, Our Memory: Towards Another Phase in the Decolonization of Caribbean Archival Memory -- Colonialism, with its inherent inequities and inequalities, have imposed and impacted on the constructs and praxis of memory and recordkeeping in the Caribbean.  Writing in 2015, I argued that “The archival/recordkeeping sphere may be the last bastion of colonialism in the region that is yet to experience the social and political changes that the English-speaking Caribbean societies have undergone for the last fifty years”. (Griffin, MSc, Unpublished). Non-textual forms and practices of documentation, with its requisite cultural systems of retention and preservation have been negatively impacted by the imposition of textual forms, practices and recordkeeping systems.  Nevertheless, records, both colonial and cultural, have served as vital evidences of oppression and resistance in the continued struggle for black liberation and reparations.In this short talk, I wish to consider the next phase/s required for liberating Caribbean archival memory, and in so doing, offer the archives and memory as tools of black liberatory activism and evidence for reparations.  Using Hawaiian attorney and independence activist Poka Laenui’s five (5) stages of decolonization, based on the experiences of Hawaii, I hope to explore this question of liberating archival memory and showing how this act can advance the cause of Black liberation and reparations. 

• Sony Prosper, Repatriation and Return: Radio Haiti Archive Case Study -- This presentation keeps track of ongoing dissertation work around how various groups view the repatriation and return of the Radio Haiti Archive, which the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University currently houses. I particularly focus on the role the Haitian diaspora plays in repatriation and return efforts, suggesting that a full understanding of archival repatriation is incomplete without examining the role diasporic communities play in such efforts. More specifically, in the case of the Radio Haiti Archive, I suggest that returning the archive to the places Haitians occupy both in Haiti and the diaspora bestows the self-determination that comes with stewarding their archives for producing knowledge (e.g., crafting narratives of their history) and other larger purposes (e.g., ensuring cultural memory, self-representation, collective memory and identity, articulating a more democratic and liberated Haitian present and future). In this presentation, I will track the concepts emerging from the literature on archival repatriation and describe two interlocking bodies of theoretically informed scholarship: critical archival studies and anti-colonial archivy that serve as theoretical lenses to help frame the research and through which to examine archival repatriation and return.

• Dr. Edwina Ashie-Nikoi, Archival Activism and Community Archives: Paths to a Decolonial African Archive? -- Born in the twilight of colonialism, conventional archival practice on the African continent was greatly influenced by the concerns of the colonialist machinery which thought little of the peoples and cultures around them. This legacy did not bode well for sub-Saharan Africa’s archival institutions which continue to largely sideline the populace’s cultural, historical, technological and scientific experiences and knowledge recorded in alternative archival registers. Thus, as Francis Garaba (2021) notes, African archival repositories contain an “over-documentation” of colonial records. The extant situation is clearly one in which there are archival frameworks operative in most African archives that (in)directly marginalise African cultural contexts and modes of recording. The question arises: how can this documentary impasse be remedied? Using Garaba’s (2021) charge to Africanise the continent’s archives as a departure point, I will briefly present my thoughts on how archival activism and community archives, two concepts not usually considered in the African context, might achieve this. In particular, I will argue that beyond consciously archiving for legal, social and political justice, there is crucial archival activism that African archivists must engage in to liberate, so to speak, the various contours of African archival and heritage practices. Committing to such documentary redress as an inclusive archival praxis is a critical step towards decolonizing the African archive and recasting the continent’s populations from colonial records’ “passive bystanders of history” to human beings with agency. 

• Rose Miyonga, Archiving the Mau Mau War in Kenya: Challenges and Opportunities -- In the 1960s, as Kenya was entering the period of decolonisation, archival evidence of torture and brutality was systematically stolen and destroyed by the British colonialists at independence, leaving survivors, activists and historians within Kenya with no access to documentary evidence of this painful past. This presentation explores the possibilities of archiving the Mau Mau war in the face of these archival erasures. Drawing on research with Mau Mau veterans in central Kenya, I look to oral histories and grassroots archiving practices, highlighting the decolonial archival practices and tools that can be used as a way of speaking to and against the grain of the decimated colonial archive. I also raise questions of provenance, custodianship, and responsibility. This is emergent work that responds to the all too real threats facing Mau Mau survivors, researchers and archivists today, and connects to a larger movement for archival justice across the Global South. The paper reinterprets these challenges to the archiving of Mau Mau histories as opportunities, questioning who is centred in decolonial archival practices, and how can we find the voices of the marginalised within institutionalised archives, and imagining possibilities for archival liberation in Kenya and across the Global South. 

Class Reading: James Lowry (2023) “Introduction,” in James Lowry (ed.), Disputed Archival Heritage, Volume II (New York: Routledge) + Browse Table of Contents (Open Source Book)

Speaker Biographies:  

• Stanley H. Griffin, Stanley H. Griffin (he/him) holds a BA (Hons.) in History, and a PhD in Cultural Studies (with High Commendation), from the Cave Hill Campus, University of the West Indies, Barbados, and an MSc in Archives and Records Management (Int’l), University of Dundee, Scotland.  Stanley is Senior Lecturer in Archival and Information Studies and coordinates the Graduate Programme in Archives and Records Management in the Department of Library and Information Studies, UWI Mona Campus. Stanley served as Deputy Dean for Undergraduate Matters in the Faculty of Humanities & Education and is now Head of the Department of Library and Information Studies (2024-2025). Stanley thinks and writes (mostly) about Caribbean archives and records, culture, history and heritage. 

• Rose Miyonga is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. Her thesis looks at the making of histories and memories of the Mau Mau War in post-independence Kenya. Her current research is concerned with questions of archival silence, and sources that speak into the gap between government records and lived experience using participatory research methodologies, non-traditional archives, and oral histories. She holds a Masters in Race and Resistance from the University of Leeds, and is a member of the Archives and Digital Media Lab. 

• Dr. Edwina D Ashie-Nikoi, PhD, is Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Ghana and affiliated with UG’s Institute of African Studies. With a background in African Diaspora history, she is interested in how culture and history are traditionally remembered, documented and represented in African/diasporan cultural systems. Broad areas of interest include Black archival traditions and memory work, decolonizing archival knowledge and practice, and “alternate archives” in Africa and its diaspora. Current projects consider archival silence, archival activism and community archives in the African context and undertake pan-African interrogations of the Archive. Edwina holds a BA (Spelman College) and PhD (New York University) in History and a MA in Information Studies (University of Ghana). 

• Sony Prosper is a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information in the United States of America. His research has concerned archival return and repatriation, how members and volunteers of community and grassroots archives conceptualize records, and how their conceptualizations inform archival programs and practices. He has published in several venues, including The Black Scholar, The American Archivist, and Information & Culture. He holds a master’s in library and information science with a concentration in archives management from Simmons University (formerly known as Simmons College). 

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Abstract: We are thrilled to host this Transnational Roundtable, a conversation with generations of people who are or have participated in some form of anti-oppression organising during their time as students in information departments and iSchools. By bringing together both past and present cohorts of students, we will share the knowledge and skills, and hand over some of the histories of student organising in our field that are too often obscured by faculty appropriation of student-led work. Speaking with those involved with groups like the Diversity Working Group (DWG), the Association of Canadian Archivists’ BIPOC Forum, UofT’s Truth and Reconciliation Student Working Group, and beyond, this roundtable highlights the role of students in driving social change and shaping the information field. While talking about the initiatives that students have taken, it is also important to note the systems which often create challenges for student organising or look to detach student efforts from their initiators.

Class Reading: Stefanie Martin, Tam Rayan and Moska Rokay (Summer 2020) “45 Years Later: The First BIPOC Forum at ACA.” Off the Record 36(3): 16-18. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ce6v8WaxwTJEG8dQjrg91Nlu7D1OHJmY/view

Speaker Biographies:  

• Kristan Belanger is a proud member of Glooscap First Nation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science as well as a Juris Doctor from Dalhousie University and is currently pursuing a Master of Information. Kristan is dedicated to promoting a holistic understanding of the interrelated fields of law, governance, and information; her research seeks to create an understanding of Indigenous law librarianship, while working alongside Mi’kmaw legal experts, Knowledge Keepers, and communities to build academic spaces for the study of Indigenous law. She also works as a research assistant at the Lnuwey Tplutaqan Wikuom (Mi’kmaw Law Lodge), where she explores how Indigenous knowledge, law, and legal information systems intersect.

• Tam Rayan is a PhD candidate in the School of Information and an Anti-Racist Digital Research Fellow at the University of Michigan. They received their MI in Information Studies and MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Their research is focused on deconstructing how colonialism operates through archival infrastructures as well as how to build transformative archival representations of those in diaspora. Specifically, they are interested in how to better serve and represent the recordkeeping needs of Palestinians with unique intergenerational traumas, impacted by forced migration, displacement, and exile. Their research has been published in Across the Disciplines and Archival Science. They have a long history of student and professional organizing, as part of the University of Toronto Diversity Working Group, the SAA-Archivists and Archives of Colour Section, the AAO Safe Spaces for BIPOC Archivists, the ACA BIPOC Special Interest Section, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (Students for Justice for Palestine, Ann Arbor chapter) and the TAHRIR Coalition.

• Stefanie Martin (she/her) is a community archivist born and raised in Quezon City, Philippines and is currently based in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BA in Sociology from the Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Information in Archives and Records Management from the University of Toronto. Since 2023, Stefanie has been the Project Archivist at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ+ Archives and was previously their Archives Assistant in 2018. In 2019, Stefanie interned at the Hamilton Public Library where she developed their 2SLGBQ+ community archives. She has also worked at non-profit and grassroots organizations serving Filipino youth, newcomers and migrant workers in the Greater Toronto Area and in Manitoba, Canada.

• Dr. Camille-Mary Sharp is Postdoctoral Associate at Western University in the Department of Visual Arts and the Centre for Sustainable Curating. She holds a PhD in Information Studies and a Master’s in Museum Studies from the University of Toronto. She was previously a 2022-2024 Faculty Fellow in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University. Camille-Mary's research explores the relation between museums and resource extraction, including sponsorship by oil and mining industries and growing protests around these partnerships. Her current project seeks to document the practices of petroleum museums, and her teaching interests include museum activism and museum theory.

• Dr. Mariam Karim is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ) where she is working on a digital archival project on Arab women’s media history. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information (iSchool) and the Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI). She served as an inaugural graduate fellow at the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and was the recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral award. Her interests lie at the intersections of multilingual media, information, gender, political theory, translation, infrastructure, historical, archival, visual, and literary studies, and decolonization.

• Kate Anderson graduated from Dalhousie University with a Juris Doctorate and a Master of Information in the spring of 2024. Currently, Kate is an articling student at Woodward & Company Lawyers in Victoria, BC. During her degree, Kate worked as the Library Intern, Reference Assistant, and Circulation Assistant at the Sir James Dunn Law Library. As a part of INFO 6850, Knowledge Justice, Kate completed a report that evaluated and critiqued how the Department of Information Science covered equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and decolonization in the core courses of the MI program. Kate is Red River Métis and a proud citizen of the Métis Nation within Alberta.

• Carolyn Smith is a second-year graduate student pursuing her Master of Information (MI) at Dalhousie University with the completion of the programs Archives Certificate. She holds a BA in History with a minor in English from Vancouver Island University. Following her undergraduate degree Carolyn started her professional career working for qathet Museum & Archives, a regional community-led organization within the Coast Salish territories of BC. Her work inspired her to further her career within the archival and information field leading her to Dalhousie’s MI program where she has been able to learn from professionals and scholars within the archival field. Carolyn is a current recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Masters Award with her thesis focusing on the charting of Indigenous sovereignty within Canadian archives. Her interests lie within the areas of archives, records management, community-based practice, decolonization, memory and identity, and policy development.

• Pax Romana is a second year MI candidate with a background in film and antiracist education. He's pursuing his masters in hopes of working in public libraries and building a queer community archive. He's interested in researching digital community organizing in the Covid era and whisper networks. He's currently researching queer grief processes and queer internet behavior. He's an Indigiqueer brother, cousin, and friend.

• Rebecca Noone is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Digital Media and Information Studies in the School of Humanities, at the University of Glasgow. Noone researches the interplay between everyday experiences of using digital media with the popular discourses and fantasies that animate contemporary digital culture. For the past ten years, she has studied discourses, practices, and politics of locative media such as digital mapping platforms, and have done so in my faculty role at the University of Glasgow, my postdoctoral research at UCL, and my PhD research at the University of Toronto, as well as part of my artistic practice.

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Abstracts: This Global Roundtable examines a variety of principles-based guiding documents, drawing out how archivists and records managers are being directly and indirectly tasked with changes to their practices in order to become more responsive and accountable to Indigenous peoples and communities. In particular, the question of how to move from awareness and education initiatives toward action and accountability measures will be brought up and explored. This session brings archival documents/protocols and debates into conversation with contemporary projects and initiatives at various institutions and sites in the country.  We are honoured to host a Global Roundtable featuring Indigenous speakers from across nations and settler jurisdictions to discuss this vital topic, as follows:

• Dr. Kirsten Thorpe and Dr. Laura Booker The International Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement empowers Indigenous peoples to assert ownership and control over data, enabling them to inform self-determined priorities and goals. In alignment with this, the International Council on Archives Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration calls for the recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights to control their archives, advocating for a radical transformation of archival practices. Recognising the vital importance of archives for truth-telling, justice-seeking, and healing. Speakers Lauren Booker (Garigal) and Kirsten Thorpe (Worimi) will share examples of research and projects underway in Australia that emphasise Indigenous-led archival methods and approaches. They will explore opportunities for institutional archives to enhance the care and management of records, supporting Indigenous well-being and the development of Indigenous Living Archives on Country.

• Kayla Lar-Son: Archives have long been the stewards of Indigenous cultural materials including Indigenous Stories and Knowledges. Many of these items have been collected without obtaining appropriate permissions from communities, and the ways in which we steward these items follows western archival practices, which do not consider the importance of cultural protocols. This conversation will explore the concept of Indigenous Data/Knowledge Sovereignty and how it relates to archives.

• Raymond Frogner: My talk will discuss the implications of the Tandanya for the NCTR which has, through the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, cited the UNDRIP as a “template for reconciliation.” Through its policies, grant proposals, and projects, the NCTR has worked to create a “decolonizing archives” informed with the advice of Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and Elders, but also following the principles set out in the UNDRIP and placed in an archival context through the Tandanya.

Class Reading:

• Watch video: Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP™).

• Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) “Calls to Action,” in Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Executive Summary of the Final Report of the TRC (Winnipeg: TRC), pp. 319-337.

• International Council on Archives/National Archives of Australia, Indigenous Matters Summit (October 2019) The Adelaide Tandanya Declaration.

• Association of Canadian Archivists’ Indigenous Archives Collective (2021) Indigenous Archives Collective Position Statement on the Right of Reply to Indigenous Knowledges and Information Held in Archives.

Speaker Biographies:

• Dr Kirsten Thorpe (Worimi, Port Stephens), Associate Professor, is a Chancellor's Indigenous Research Fellow at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research, University of Technology Sydney. Kirsten leads the Indigenous Archives and Data Stewardship Hub, which advocates for Indigenous rights in archives and data, and develops research and engagement in relation to refiguring libraries and archives to support the culturally appropriate ownership, management and ongoing preservation of Indigenous knowledges. Kirsten has broad interests in research and engagement with Indigenous protocols and decolonising practices in the library and archive fields, and the broader GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector. Kirsten advocates for the 'right of reply' to records, and capacity building and support for the development of Living Indigenous Archives on Country. Kirsten is an invited member of the International Council on Archives Expert Group on Indigenous Matters, a co-founder of the Indigenous Archives Collective, and an elected member of the International Federation of Libraries (IFLA) Indigenous Matters Section (2023-2027). In 2023, Kirsten was appointed as a member of the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council, for a three-year term. In 2024, Kirsten joined the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective as an Executive Member to progress conversations about Indigenous data rights in GLAM.

• Dr. Lauren Booker (Garigal) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Indigenous Archives and Data Stewardship Hub at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Lauren has worked across the museums and archives sector on projects supporting First Nations communities and organisations to access their cultural and intellectual property held in collecting institutions. This includes working in consultation with the public library network regarding language documentation identification and the use of manuscripts in language revitalisation. Her work also focuses on planning and facilitating the digitisation of cultural heritage and photographic collections, and the organisation of digital community archives that meet community priorities. Lauren's PhD research 'Hair Samples as Ancestors and Futures of Community-led Collection Care' (2024) investigated how in the settler-colonial project of Australia the racialised sampling of hair from First Nations peoples during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, materialised racial fictions of hair hierarchy, driven by global imperial and colonial agendas. Lauren works in support of the Right to Know and the Right of Reply in archives, repatriation and increased institutional transparency and ethical practice across the GLAM sector. Lauren is also a member of the Indigenous Archives Collective.

• Raymond Frogner has an MA from the University of Victoria and an MAS degree from the University of British Columbia. He is the Head of Archives and Director of Research for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. His publications have twice won the Kaye Lamb Prize and the Alan D. Ridge Award of Merit. He is a recent Fellow of the ACA. In 2018, he became Co-chair of the ICA Special Committee on Indigenous Matters. He was principal author of “Tandanya/The Adelaide Declaration”, the official ICA Declaration on archives and Indigenous rights. He continues to write on matters of Indigenous identity and archives.
  
  
• Kayla Lar-Son is a citizen of the Metis Nation of Alberta, with mix Ukrainian heritage, and is originally from Tofield, Alberta. She holds a BA in Native Studies and MLIS from the University of Alberta. Kayla is the current Acting Head of the Xwi7xwa Library, and Indigenous Programs and Services Librarian.