2022‑2023 Antiracism Lectures

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Abstract: This presentation provides a critical biography of Hilary Jenkinson with a focus on his 1912 publication, “The Records of the English African Companies,” his participation in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section during WWII, and his 1948 memo on colonial archives. Using these three points, it situates Jenkinson as an imperial actor through the lenses of race, capital and empire and extends reflection on these contexts into the development of Anglo-archival practice.

Biography: Riley Linebaugh (PhD) is a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany. Her PhD, “Curating the Colonial Past: Britain’s ‘Migrated Archives’ and the Struggle for Kenya’s History,” analyzes the politics of the ownership, location and use of colonial archives in the Kenya-British case (1952-present day). Previously, she received her MA in Archives and Records Management from University College London. She has worked as an archivist in Uganda, England, and the U.S."

Lecture Readings:

• Hilary Jenkinson (1922) A Manual of Archive Administration: Including the Problem of War Archives and Archive Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 1-22.
• Hilary Jenkinson (1912) “The Records of the English African Companies.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6: 185-220.
• Walter Rodney (1970) “The Imperialist Partition of Africa.” Monthly Review 21(11): 103-114.
• Shannon Hodge, Sarah Nantel, and Chris Trainor (2022) “Remnants of Jenkinson: Observations on Settler Archival Theory in Canadian Archival Appraisal Discourse.” Archives & Records 43(2): 147-60.
• James Lowry and Verne Harris (2022) “Settler to Settler (Reading ‘Remnants of Jenkinson’).” Archives & Records 43(2): 161-163.
• Mpho Ngoepe (2022) “Reflections on ‘Remnants of Jenkinson: Observations on Settler Archival Theory in Canadian Archival Appraisal Discourse.’” Archives and records 43(2): 164-165.
• Greg Bak (2022) “Appraisal in Need of Re-Appraisal: Reflections on ‘Confronting Jenkinson’s Canon: Reimagining the ‘Destruction and Selection of Modern Archives” through the Auditor-General of South Africa’s Financial Audit Trail.’” Archives and records 43(2): 177-179.

Co-hosted with CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab & Dalhousie University’s School of Information Management.

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Abstract: Nationally, the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) called on Canadian archives, museums, and libraries to take up the challenge of decolonization, truth telling and national reconciliation. These calls reflect, among other things, the fact that the TRC had to take the Government of Canada to court multiple times over access to archives and records. The TRC’s successor body, the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, continues to face barriers to archival access to fulfill its vital mandate. Globally, similar archival challenges have been a feature of most truth and reconciliation initiatives from South Africa to Morocco. Similarly, contestations over archival access and ownership have been a feature of the relationship between European countries and their former colonies in Africa and Asia because records displaced to Europe in the context of Third World political decolonization in the mid-20th century have rarely been repatriated. How to imagine a future in which such archival legacies of colonialism are redressed? This open classroom explores this question with renowned personalities and leading experts, Dr. Ellen Namhila (Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Namibia), Dr. Nathan Mnjama (Professor, Department of Library & Information Studies, University of Botswana), and Dr. James Lowry (Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Library & Information Studies, CUNY). Co-hosted by CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab and Dalhousie University’s School of Information Management, this open classroom features cases from Namibia and Botswana, alongside consideration of the potential and limits of the Vienna Convention on the Succession of States with Respect to State Property, Archives & Debt (1983) to inform and help resolve disputed archival claims between now independent states and their former western colonial rulers.  

Biographies:

• Ellen Ndeshi Namhila was born at Ondobe village in northern Namibia in 1963, and went into exile when she was twelve years old. She got her education in Namibia, Angola, Zambia, The Gambia, and Finland, obtaining an M.SSc. in Library and Information Science at the University of Tampere, Finland. She has worked as a researcher and librarian at the Multidisciplinary Research Centre; as a Deputy Director: Research, Information and Library Services at the Namibian Parliament; Director of Namibia Library and Archives Service in the Ministry of Education; University Librarian at the University of Namibia; and currently the Pro-ViceChancellor: Administration and Finance at the University of Namibia. Ellen is author of: The Price of Freedom, her autobiography (1997); Kahumba Kandola - Man and Myth: the Biography of a Barefoot Soldier (2005); Tears of Courage: Five Mothers Five Stories One Victory (2009); Mukwahepo: Woman, Soldier, Mother (2013); Native estates: records of mobility across colonial boundaries (2017); and “Little research value”: African estate records and colonial gaps in a post-colonial national archive (2017). She received her PhD degree at the University of Tampere, Finland in 2015.
• Nathan Mnjama is a Professor in the Department of Library and Information Studies, University of Botswana with specialization in Archives and Records Management. His PhD was on Railway Records: Their Management and Exploitation in Kenya. Prof Mnjama has worked as an archivist and records manager at the Kenya National Archives and was responsible for the location and copying of Kenyan archives from the UK between 1980 and 1985. He has considerable experience in teaching and delivery of archives and records management programmes having lectured at the School of Information Sciences, Moi University Kenya, and since 1996 at the Department of Library and Information Studies University of Botswana where he has been instrumental in the design of archives and records management programmes. Prof. Mnjama is a well-known speaker and presenter in archives and records management forums in East and Southern Africa, and he has published extensively in the field of archives and records management in Africa. Prof. Mnjama has participated in several records management initiatives organized by the International Records Management Trust aimed at improving archives and records keeping practices in Africa.
• James Lowry is founder and director of the Archival Technologies Lab, and Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York. He is an Honorary Research Fellow and former co-director of the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies, where he taught following a ten year career in archives and records management. As a practitioner, he worked in Australia, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, including projects for international organisations such as the African Union and the International Criminal Court. Dr. Lowry has a PhD from University College London and a Masters in Information Management from Curtin University. His research is concerned with official records, data and power, particularly in colonial, post-colonial and diasporic contexts. Through the Displacements and Diasporas project, he has worked to foster international dialogue around displaced archives. In his work on open government and open data, he has introduced record-keeping principles and techniques into open government policy and data curation to help address information asymmetry. His interest in the history of archival thinking led to the formation of the Archival Discourses research network. He is also co-PI on the Refugee Rights in Records project. His recent publications include Displaced Archives, an edited volume published in 2017, and he is series editor of the Routledge Studies in Archives series.

Lecture Readings:

• United Nations (1983) Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts (Read: “Preamble” on p. 2 + Part III (pp. 8-13))
• Ellen Ndeshi Namhila (2004) "Filling the gaps in the archival record of the Namibian struggle for independence." IFLA Journal 30 (3): 224-230.
• Ellen Ndeshi Namhila (2015) "Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance and the Liberation Struggle (AACRLS): An Integrated Programme to Fill the Colonial Gaps in the Archival Record of Namibia." Journal for Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences: 168-178.
• Nathan Mnjama (2016) “Migrated Archives: The African Perspectives.” Journal of the South African Society of Archivists 48: 45-54.
• Browse: ACARM (2017) Migrated Archives: ACARM Position Paper. Adopted at the ACARM Annual General Meeting, Mexico City.
• Riley Linebaugh and James Lowry (2021) The archival colour line: race, records and post-colonial custody. Archives and Records 42(3): 284-303.
• J.J. Ghaddar (Fall 2022) “Provenance in Place: Crafting the Vienna Convention for Global Decolonization and Archival Repatriation,” in James Lowry (ed.) Disputed Archival Heritage, Volume II (New York: Routledge).

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Abstract: This open classroom will examine a variety of principles-based guiding documents, drawing out how archives and archivists 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. It brings these archival documents and debates into conversation with the project based out of McMaster University, "The Challenge of Reconciliation: What We Can Learn from the Stories of the Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium and the Mohawk Institute Residential School.” This project will intervene in narrow understandings of reconciliation by turning to the stories of the Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium and the Mohawk Institute Residential School. What can these stories teach us about possibilities for a more substantive reckoning with the many promises of reconciliation? The project involves a significant amount of archival research and engagement, including the development of a lay summary of existing archival records relating to the Mohawk Institute and the Mountain Sanatorium.

Biographies:

• Vanessa Watts is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, where she also holds the Paul R. Macpherson Research Chair in Indigenous Studies. Her research examines Indigenist epistemological and ontological interventions on place-based, material knowledge production. Vanessa is particularly interested in Indigenous feminisms, sociology of knowledge, Indigenous governance, and other-than-human relations as forms of Indigenous ways of knowing. Dr. Watts was awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her project that interrogates over a century of representations of Indigenous peoples in sociology and political science. It will contribute to new knowledge in the field of Indigenous studies through an inductively generated concept map of Indigenous understandings of social beings. Dr. Watts was nominated for the YWCA Woman of Distinction in Community Leadership and was awarded McMaster’s President’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning in 2022. 
• Krystal Payne is a settler archivist living on Treaty One Territory (Winnipeg, MB), who grew up on unceded territory covered by the Treaties of Peace and Friendship (Hillsdale, NB). After spending many years working as a community health educator in sexual and mental health with a harm reduction and trauma-informed approach, Krystal now studies and works with archival records as a project archivist and researcher with the Kishaadigeh Collaborative Research Centre (University of Winnipeg) and as an incoming PhD student at the University of Manitoba. In these roles she tries her best to practice relationship-based archival work in the spirit of collaboration while imagining the archival possibilities that come with centring people and communities.
• Amber Dean is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research focuses on public mourning, violence, and cultural memory, and contemplates what makes a life widely “grievable” in the context of contemporary, colonial Canada. She is also interested in how creative forms of cultural production (fiction, art, photography, film, performance) disrupt and reframe common-sense understandings of whose lives (and deaths) matter. Dr. Dean is the author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance, and co-editor of Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning, with Chandrima Chakraborty and Angela Failler. With Susanne Luhmann and Jennifer L. Johnson, she also co-edited Feminist Praxis Revisited: Critical Reflections on University-Community Engagement. Dr. Dean was named McMaster’s University Scholar in 2021, an award that supports her community- and student-engaged project on the Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ archives. 

Lecture Readings:

• Browse: Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP™).
• United Nations, General Assembly (2007) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
• Browse: Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance
• First Archivist Circle (2007) Protocols for Native American Archival Material.
• 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.
• ICA/NAA Indigenous Matters Summit (October 2019) The Adelaide Tandanya Declaration.
• Krystal Payne (2021) “Chapter Two: Guiding Documents for Archives and Archivists,” in Archival Harm Reduction: Utilizing Public Health Harm Reduction Concepts for Reconciliatory Power Shifts in Archives. Thesis (University of Manitoba), pp. 32-58.
• Association of Canadian Archivist’s Response to the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce (2020) A Reconciliation Framework for Canadian Archives (ACA).
• 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.

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Abstract: It is no longer a secret or revelation in the wider archival community that western or colonial archives and records played a role in the colonization of Indigenous peoples around the globe. The process of reconciling this fact has been handled differently by archives in various regions, and for the most part has been a tentative and slow process in fear of not engaging the right way or making a misstep in connecting with the Indigenous communities and peoples represented in their holdings. In May of 2021, this tentativeness changed forever. When the 215 potential gravesites of children were identified by Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc at the Kamloops Residential School site, the urgency for archives and records to build meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities was sent into overdrive. In the months that followed, dozens of communities began to research unmarked burial sites across Canada, requiring access to millions of government and church records held by countless repositories. This guest lecture will start by looking at how archival and records management theory and practice can help make connections based on a plural provenance model to assist in addressing inequalities in the arrangement, description, and access of archival materials and records related to Indigenous peoples. It will then discuss key areas where archives and records can play a role in assisting community-led research initiatives in terms of records management, stewarding community archives, capacity building, and including Indigenous perspectives into archival acquisition policies and mandates.

Biography: Jesse Boiteau is Head of Archives at the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation (NCTR) and is a member of the Métis Nation. He completed his Masters in Archival Studies at the University of Manitoba, focusing on the intersections between Western archival theory and practice, and Indigenous notions of archives and memory to shed light on how the NCTR can accommodate and blend multiple viewpoints in its processes. Jesse works within a close archives team to process the records collected by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in Canada, make new collections available online, and respond to access requests from Residential School Survivors. He is also continually researching ways to leverage new technologies to honour the experiences and truths of Survivors through innovative and participatory archival practices.

Readings:

• Association of Canadian Archivist’s Response to the Report of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission Taskforce (2020) A reconciliation framework for Canadian archives.
• Browse: Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP™).
• United Nations, General Assembly (2007) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
• International Council on Archives/NAA Indigenous Matters Summit (October 2019) The Adelaide Tandanya Declaration.

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Abstract: In the 1950s, the British colonial government launched a brutal counterinsurgency against the revolutionary Mau Mau movement in Kenya. In an effort to quash the anticolonial uprising, British colonialists imprisoned over 150,000 people without trial in detention camps where torture and murder were commonplace. In the early 1960s, as the British began their exit from empire in Kenya, they took with them the evidence of this brutality. Hundreds of thousands of archival documents detailing their atrocities were destroyed, and many more were stolen away to a secret archive in the United Kingdom. This paper addresses the question of archival losses and silences in the context of Mau Mau history. It uses case studies from fieldwork with Mau Mau veterans to look at how survivors, activists and academics have been able to find alternatives to state-run archives in the context of the destruction and theft of these sources. By exploring these non-traditional archives, I also link to wider questions of decolonial archiving and record-creation.

Biography: Rose Miyonga is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick in the Department of History, where her research focuses on the making of histories and memories of the Mau Mau War in post-independence Kenya. Methodologically, this research draws on her interest in oral records and non-traditional archives in historical research, and particularly in African history. In current academic work, she deals with questions of archival silence, and of how to find narratives and sources that speak into the gap between government records and lived experience. As such, she is also engaged with participatory research methodologies and influenced by oral history practices that emanate from the African continent.

Readings:

• Rose Miyonga (Dec. 2021) Imagining Kenyan futures through Kenyan pasts. The Elephant 3.
• Chao Tayiana Maina and Max Pinckers (2020) Reimagining time, reconstructing space: visual approaches to Mau Mau history in Kenya. Trigger: Uncertainty, FOMU - Fotomuseum Antwerp.

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Abstract: In conversation with Rose Miyonga, this roundtable brings together trailblazing and innovative practitioners and scholars working to address the many gaps, silences and erasures in Kenyan archival memory and documentary heritage due to the history and legacies of British colonial rule and its brutal counterinsurgency practices in the country. With a focus on resistant and marginalized histories and perspectives, participants will share their experiences with a range of alternative approaches to address the archival gaps and silences, from crowdsourcing and “imagined records” to living archives and participatory documentary projects. Chao Tayiana Maina will speak about living archives -- how they are embodied in people, infrastructure and landscape, particularly in relation to the Mau Mau uprising and the ways in which this history influences present day ideas of nationhood in Kenya. Maureen Mumbia will discuss the Book Bunk's project that seeks to build a visual and audio archive from crowd sourced stories from the library community dubbed, “The Missing Bits” project. Max Pinckers will speak on Unhistories (2015-ongoing), a documentary project in collaboration with Kenyan Mau Mau war veterans and survivors of atrocities committed by British colonial rule in the 1950s that aims to (re)visualize the fight for independence from their personal perspectives. With most of the colonial archives deliberately destroyed, hidden or manipulated, Unhistories created new “imagined records” that fill in the missing gaps of historical archives.

Biographies:

• Chao Tayiana Maina is a Kenyan historian and digital heritage specialist that works at the intersection of digital humanities and public education. She uses digital technologies to unearth previously hidden or suppressed historical narratives, make these accessible to a wider audience and enable communities to engage with their cultural heritage.  She has a background in computer sciences with a specialization in digital heritage studies. Her work is not simply about presenting existing historical archives in a modern way. It is about using technology to excavate stories and center people that have previously been excluded from historical narratives. Using tools such as digital visualizations and oral history recordings, she believes that modern forms of historical presentation can subvert traditional hierarchies in order to make previously hidden forms of knowledge visible. Thus, her work to legitimize the formerly delegitimised narratives has a reparative power. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage, a co-founder of the Museum of British Colonialism and a co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa project.
• Maureen Mumbua works as the archives coordinator at Book Bunk - an organisation seeking to restore Kenya’s second oldest library. She leads the digitisation department in preserving the items held by the library as well as archiving Kenya’s more recent history in audio format. She was part of the ‘The Missing Bits’ project which sought to address the decentering of average black Kenyan narratives from Kenya’s recorded history.
• Rose Miyonga is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick in the Department of History, where her research focuses on the making of histories and memories of the Mau Mau War in post-independence Kenya. Methodologically, this research draws on her interest in oral records and non-traditional archives in historical research, and particularly in African history. In current academic work, she deals with questions of archival silence, and of how to find narratives and sources that speak into the gap between government records and lived experience. As such, she is also engaged with participatory research methodologies and influenced by oral history practices that emanate from the African continent.
• Max Pinckers' work explores the critical, technological and ideological structures that surround the production and consumption of documentary images. Pinckers’ work draws on contemporary and historical debates, merging fact, fiction and imagination to reflect on the ways that the real is defined and represented. It treats documentary as a hybrid practice involving not just images, but objects, performance, texts, found footage and sculptural interventions that investigate the complex nature of perception. Collaboration is essential to Pinckers’ practice, creating a space for the exchange of ideas between himself and the people he works with, and for critical examination of his own position as a photographer. Ultimately, Pinckers’ self-reflexive work sets out to question both documentary discourse and artistic practice -- to create new modes of documentary that foreground the deceptive nature of images yet always emotionally and empathically engages with people and their stories. His work takes shape as self-published artist books and exhibition installations such as The Fourth Wall (2012), Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty (2014), and Margins of Excess (2018). Pinckers is a Doctor in the Arts and guest lecturer at the School of Arts KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent, Belgium. He has received multiple international awards, such as the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg 2015 and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2018. In 2015, he founded the independent publishing house Lyre Press and The School of Speculative Documentary in 2017. Pinckers is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp and Tristan Lund in London."

Readings:

• Riley Linebaugh and James Lowry (2021). The archival colour line: race, records and post-colonial custody. Archives and Records.
• Rose Miyonga (Dec. 2021) Imagining Kenyan futures through Kenyan pasts. The Elephant 3.
• Chao Tayiana Maina and Max Pinckers (2020) Reimagining time, reconstructing space: visual approaches to Mau Mau history in Kenya. Trigger: Uncertainty, FOMU - Fotomuseum Antwerp.