Season 2, Episode 1: “You might as well have fun while you're at it, because you're already in trouble.”
In this episode we talk to Michelle Caswell, professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of UCLA’s Community Archive Lab (https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/).
Michelle is also the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA, https://www.saada.org/), and author of Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge Press, 2021), which is available open access here.
Transcript
Sophie: Ladies and gentlemen. And all of us who are neither and or both. The welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome welcome back. To what is solidarity history? The podcasts or the solidarity history initiative so excited to be back doing this again. Those of you who may have heard the first season might be forgiven for thinking that we were actually done, but but friends, there was so many more people to talk to. I've met so many wonderful people working in this space that I wanted to keep learning from them. So we're still doing this. We're still doing this. so welcome, welcome, welcome back. To what we're now calling season two. I'm so excited about this. We have Michelle Caswell today. Who I think, I think it's fair to say, I don't think it's hyperbole to say that her work has inspired so many of us who are trying to think about how to do this work. Just really thankful for everything, everything that she's contributed. Ah, Let's get started
Hello, Michelle. How are you?
Michelle: Hi, Sophie, I am so excited to be here. I'm doing great.
Sophie: Fantastic. I wonder, just to kick us off, would you be willing to say a little bit by way of introduction to yourself and the work that you do?
Michelle: Sure. I'm a professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and I'm also the co founder of a community based archive called the South Asian American Digital Archive, or SAADA, which I co founded with Samip Malik, who's been the executive director ever since, so for the past 15 years. Um, at UCLA, I'm the co director of the UCLA Community Archives Lab, together with Tonya Sutherland and Thuy Vo Dang, who are amazing colleagues. And we do research in support of community based archives, together with, alongside, and in support of community based archives.
Sophie: Your work, I don't think it's, it's overblown to say, like, your work is very, very influential for those of us who are trying to piece together how to do archives outside of traditional institutions, how to sort of think about memory work in a broader sense. So thank you, first of all, for all the amazing work that you do.
First up, can you talk to us a little bit about how y'all define community archives how y'all think about community archives as you do your work
Michelle: this is a really good question. How do you define a community archives?
I think the initial definitions of community archives in the field came out in like 2009. Andrew Flynn's really important research on community archives defined community archives as like "A community is any group of people who come together and call themselves a community" and a "community archives is any attempt to document the history of their commonality," and I think that was a really important first definition.
But I think in at least the US context, which is the only context I can really speak from, we need to be much more specific and have a power analysis there when we talk about community archives, right? So I teach a community archives class and I ask my students, is the Beverly Hills Historical Society a community archive?
And by that initial definition, absolutely it is, right? It's a group of people who have come together to document the history of their commonality. But I think once we start thinking more carefully and closely about power, I'm really interested in what I call minoritized identity- based community archives, which is, I know, very clunky, I'm not great with acronyms.
But I think that's, that's the more specific, precise language of the phenomenon that I'm interested in, uh, exploring and supporting, which is minoritized groups who have been left out of mainstream archives, mainstream history books, mainstream narratives, that really come together despite all of the barriers, the amount of work that it takes, the lack of space, the divestment in these communities that have come together and decided that it's really important to preserve their history in an autonomous way, right?
And so, yes, you know, there are lots of historical societies that could be defined as community- based archives using that sort of basic definition. But a lot of historical societies are actually really invested in white supremacy and invested in their own property value and maintaining this white history in order to maintain property values, right?
And so I think we need to distinguish between those kinds of historical societies, not all historical societies for sure, but those historical societies that do that versus those organizations, those memory work projects that are really emerging out of minoritized communities.
And then we can have a conversation about power, right? And who gets included and who gets excluded in dominant narratives and dominant institutions.
Sophie: I love that so much. Thank you. Thank you. Because I think that helps me and I imagine a lot of people who try to talk about this. I do teach some archives classes through different institutions and sometimes I find myself in the position of explaining In some very important ways, all archives are community archives, it's just that the communities happen to be the dominant culture.
Michelle: Absolutely. I think that's exactly right. It's not just minoritized people that have community, right? Certainly, white rich donors to large private institutions, they also have community, even if they don't call it that or don't recognize it as that.
And I think we have to be really careful that we're not using community as a euphemism, right? Let's actually use the precise words for what we're talking about. Community is one of those terms that gets bandied about quite a bit in an academic context. And I think we need to take a step back and say, what exactly are we talking about?
And are we afraid to say something? You know, are we afraid to talk about race? Are we afraid to talk about sexuality and gender? Are we afraid to talk about class? Let's unpack that. Let's not be so afraid. And so you're using precise language.
Sophie: You are the first person who works at an academic institution. Who's been on to talk to us about a lot of these topics. And I wonder if from your perspective. From that position. I wonder if you could say a little bit about this, right. So UCLA is at least to those of us on the outside. It looks like a very large, very well-funded institution. And to have a center on community archives in a situation like that. Can you just sort of talk about some of the i don't know would you say friction if not friction then that'd be some of the interplay that y'all think about from that angle
Michelle: Yeah, I mean there are definitely frictions and tensions there for sure. Um, it often feels like I'm doing parallel work or twice as much work in two different fronts. Right? So the work that I do with SAADA and other community archives, most of that work is not really valued by the academy. It's not valued by the tenure and promotion process.
It's work that I find so much meaning from and more meaning from that community engaged community based work that I do many of the academic tasks that I have, And so it's, it's been a tough 11 years, right? It has felt like I, again, like, sometimes I do twice as much work. So I do all of the community engaged work.
And then I also am still subject to all of the, you know, pressures for publication, for research, for grants, and a good example of this is that now I'm a full professor, but when I went up for tenure, when I went up for also promotion to full professor, you need to get letters of support from other academics who are higher up in the, chain than you are.
So at that point, deans, right? I struggled, first of all, to find deans who would write good letters of support for me because of the kind of work that I do often pushes back against dominant power structures.
But also, for me, letters of support from community-based archivists are way more important to me than letters from deans at iSchools. But those letters are not counted as being valuable and so I went back and forth and really pushed back against those dominant conventions for what counts as a legitimate letter of recommendation. In the end, I was able to get letters from community based archivists included as a supplemental material, you know, but for me those letters are way more important.
And I think particularly at the start of my time as an academic, I wound up writing about everything I was doing with SAADA or everything I was doing with community based archives. So, turning all of that community engaged work into, um, a unit of measurement that the Academy can understand, which is a written publication.
I think there's a conversation happening now. There's, new guidelines for tenure and promotion that would include community engaged work as work in and of itself that is valued.
So there's that, but I think also there is this tension, right, that I'm at a dominant institution, a land grant institution, thankfully it's a public institution, but that has real issues and real power dynamics, um, that are at play at this institution. And I do work that tries to undo those power dynamics and sometimes I'm successful and most of the time I'm not successful at it.
I think we all need to find ways, those of us who work for dominant institutions, to cultivate a sense of joy in kicking brick walls. Right. And that's something my most recent book, Urgent Archives is a good reminder to myself that there should be, we should try to cultivate a sense of joy in poking our finger at, established power dynamics. Even if we might feel a sense of hopelessness in doing so that that act of resistance in and of itself should be or can be joyful.
And that's that's sometimes hard, hard message, something that I have to really remind myself as someone who, you know, I'm from the Midwest. I'm, you know, was raised as a good little white girl to follow the rules and I have to remind myself like: no, you're already in trouble, so you might as well keep being in trouble. You might as well have fun while you're at it, because you're already in trouble.
I love that. And yeah, right, so all the wrong people already know who we are.
I'm already got a list. is, I'm on it. So...
Sophie: I would love to talk to you about how you think of yourself as an archival educator with all of that. Right. I can preface this by saying that in my own experience. I feel like I need to explain to students that a large part of their archival education is to teach them how to go off and be an archivist in an established institution.
And what it would take to be an archivist in a different type of setting, a community oriented setting, for instance, would not necessarily take a different type of training, but the emphasis would be different. And because there's only so much time to be in library school to be in archive school. We focus on how to help them get a job that can help them pay back their loans and allow them to eat. And because of those sort of at the expense of teaching people how to be thoughtful community archivists And what y'all do at UCLA, what you're working on over there, seems to mix the two a lot, and i just wonder if you could say a little bit about that.
Michelle: Yeah, this is reason why I actually love being at UCLA is because from the start the program has had a much broader conceptualization of what is Archival studies, what is an archive, what we're doing, right?
So we're certainly training people to be professional archivists, right? We have to do that. Our students have to graduate and get jobs, like any other MLIS student, any other MLIS program. But from the very start, we want them to think very critically about what it is we're doing, right? So like, what is a record? What does it mean to transmit knowledge over time? What is evidence? What are the evidentiary qualities of a record? What kinds of institutions steward records? Who has the power to create records, right?
So we're doing both of those things at the same time, which I think is very different from my own experience as an MLIS student in which I was taught, like, Here's how you put something in a box. Here's how you remove the staples. Here's how you do a folder, a series level description of folders in a box. And we were not taught to think critically at all about like, well, wait a second, where did these concepts come from?
I think that's really important to historically situate. Where dominant Western archival theory comes from and even describing it that right as like it's dominant Western archival theory is only one way of many ways to think about stewarding potential evidence of human activity across space and time.
And so from the very start in the intro to archives class we're teaching students to think really critically about these concepts but I should also say that our students often come to the classroom with this critical lens already. A lot of our students come with undergraduate degrees in ethnic studies or gender studies or history that already are asking these questions. And our students really push me to do better and push me to think more broadly than I might have otherwise, which is fantastic.
Many of our students don't wind up working in dominant institutions. So for the past six years now, I've run an internship program that's funded by the Mellon Foundation, where we place our second year MLIS students at seven different community archive sites in Southern California. And now we have like a lineage where some of those students have now been hired on as archivists at those community archives sites. So if I had only been training those students and dominant Western practices. They would not have been able to succeed in that environment.
But also regardless of what kind of institution a student winds up working for, whether it's an academic institution or a corporate archive --I'm in Los Angeles, so a lot of studios, you know, film studios have archivists, and that's another possible career path for students-- I think thinking about community engaged perspectives, thinking about power dynamics, those are like important professional skills that they will need regardless of the kind of institution that they work for.
I'm really glad to be at an institution, at a program where that's just kind of assumed, right? So I, a lot of my colleagues who work for other MLIS programs that have a more dominant kind of baggage in terms of the kind of archival theory and archival practices that they promote, often feel like they're really fighting just to teach concepts differently, and I feel like I have more freedom at UCLA, which I appreciate.
Sophie: I was thinking about asking you this question anyway, so maybe I'll go ahead and do it now, even though it's sort of a big and floppy messy question. But since we're on the topic of education in the archival field, Uh, do you have thoughts about where the field is headed?
Michelle: Yeah, I think the answer that to that question is like in our own hands. I think if we continue to just reproduce dominant Western archival ways of thinking and doing archives, then we're not going to be anywhere good as a profession. I think we really need to explode the dominant Western concepts and practices and make ourselves relevant to the extremely important work that needs to be done in terms of reckoning with the past, holding power accountable for the past and current power imbalances.
I think that we can retool our field to really be at the center of conversations about reckoning with the past, and I think we need to do that in order to to be relevant. I think we can do that. We absolutely can do that. But we have to, transform and we have to dismantle and we have to reimagine.
I think the core of what we do is about how to activate traces of the past for liberation work now. And that is an important fundamental question that needs to be answered and needs to be engaged. But I think if we're too busy thinking about how do you arrange a bunch of files in a box, we're not going to get there.
Which is also important. I don't mean to like, you know, downplay how important it is to put files in a box, but that's just one of the many tasks that I think we need to do, right? So like, We should be at the center of conversations about history textbooks being rewritten. We should be at the center of conversations about books being banned. We should be at the center of conversations about reparations, about land back movements.
Sophie: I love the idea of being at the center of those conversations. I'm also thankful for you for saying the term liberation work. And I would love to use that as a segue to talk about your book that you mentioned before, urgent archives. Would you be willing to introduce that book to us
Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. So Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. it came out in 2021 from Routledge Press. It's now actually freely available for download on the Routledge site, so everyone go download it, won't cost you anything. In some ways the book was a way of putting like a theoretical frame or theoretical sense- making around the community based work that I had been doing for a long time.
So it really looked at this framework of liberatory memory work, which I take from Vern Harris, who is at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, is a well known South African archivist, who, as far as I know, is the first to really use that term liberatory memory work, and really unpack what that means and unpack, disentangle, some of the theories that I think are involved in liberatory memory work.
So first I talk about temporality and dominant linear narratives about time and progress, and I use critical race theory, particularly Derek Bell, to really disentangle, dismantle those dominant Western ways of thinking about time that are embedded in some key archival concepts like record, right?
So one of like the standard elevator speeches that archivists give is that we preserve traces of the past for the future. And I say, hold up, wait a second, right? What is this future? Where are we now? There's kind of a logic, a temporal, chronological, linear logic embedded in there, that there is a progress narrative that things happened in the past. They're over. They're done. We're in the present moment. In the present moment, the intervention is preservation. And then in the future, some unnamed actors will come and activate that.
And I want to complicate that notion, right? So I talk about how harm is ongoing. It has not ended, right? The two, you know, foundational sins of U. S. society, the genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of African people, the effects of those are ongoing. So we need to do something different, we need to think about records differently because of that. So I'm using archival theory to explode linear progress narratives.
And asking for us to rewrite dominant Western archival theory because there are so many ways of thinking about time and so many different ways of thinking about record that are not currently reflected in that dominant conception. So that's like the first chapter, which is kind of the most like heavy theoretical chapter.
But then the other chapters really kind of unpack what is liberatory memory work and what is liberatory memory work from my perspective, which I want to be crystal clear: I'm just one person, right? Like I'm a tenured white lady in California. Like this is not the definitive, guide to what is liberatory memory work, but my kind of initial take on it, which is, Thinking about all of the work that I had done about the importance of representation in the face of symbolic annihilation, and saying, yes, that is absolutely important, right?
It is absolutely important for members of minoritized communities to see themselves in the historic record. It's absolutely important for archivists to collect much more broadly than they have been collecting. That is an important part of liberatory memory work, but we need to do more than that, and the more than that is, really activate the records for material shifts.
So for things like land back claims for indigenous communities and for financial reparations for African American communities. And so I talked about the ways that we can actually activate the records that we're stewarding for those very material shifts. And that for me, we cannot just talk about representation without those material shifts. The material shifts are key, in our conceptualization of liberatory memory work.
And so how do we do that? I think we need to get organizers into our archives to activate the materials that we steward. Our collections are full of information about what strategies worked, what strategies failed in the past, um, tactics, what worked, what didn't work, inspiration, right?
I interviewed someone who was a user of Lambda Archives in San Diego, who was talking about going through the meeting minutes of the Queer Liberation Front in the 1970s and having this epiphany that like, Oh, wait, these people didn't have their act together either. They were just like me. They were just a handful of people who constantly argued with each other, who came together and did this amazing thing. And if they could do that, then I could do that too.
In the book, I come up with this concept corollary record, which is a record that refers to a moment in which there is historic precedent. So once we start to think about time, not as a linear progress narrative, but as a series of like cycles, we can go back in the archive and look at like, what other moments are very similar to the moment that we're living with now? And how did our predecessors deal with those moments?
We can activate corollary records to find out strategies, tactics, get inspiration, so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel in our own activism.
Sophie: I appreciate that you, you mentioned specifically Verne Harris in finding the term liberatory memory work. Um, I wonder if we could circle back to that a little bit specifically the memory work. So, memory work and memory workers. Like this is a term that's sort of been around for a little while. It's in the society of American archivists glossary. Um, it shows up in different places.
I myself use it for what I think is a helpful generalization of folks who do the same type of work, oral historians as well as community historians, as well as those of us who were trained archivist. And I'd love to put this question to you: so how are you thinking about memory workers? How are you thinking about memory?
Michelle: Yeah, this is such a good question. I mean, I think The professional holes that we've gotten ourselves in are based on really dominant Western colonialist white supremacist categories, right?
So the distinction between what an archivist does, what a librarian does, what a museum worker does, those are very colonial distinctions that are rooted in a way of seeing difference and seeing value and seeing worth and seeing you know, three dimensional objects versus two dimensional objects, published versus unpublished material.
And I think using the term memory work for me starts to unravel those distinctions and points us in a different direction points us across categories of solidarity. All of us who do this kind of work, whatever the designation is, whatever your job title is, whether you have an MLIS degree or not, we're all engaged in trying to get society to remember, right?
Aspects of the past and to really think about how the past is present in the present, right? And so for me, that term memory work cuts across all of those boundaries . Like, I don't want to get into a fight about the value of an MLIS degree or the difference between someone who's like professionally trained versus not.
And so for me, that term memory work opens up possibilities for solidarity and collaboration, rather than designation, division, inequity.
And then if you add liberatory on top of it, now we're getting somewhere, right? So it's like, why are we doing this? What is the memory for? Oh, it's for liberation. Okay, great. Now we're on board right now. We're getting somewhere.
Sophie: Yes. And I would love it if we got somewhere. Michelle, thank you for everything that you've talked about. Thank you for spending time with us. At this point i would love to give you the opportunity if you would like to tell us what's next for you and talk to us about what you're excited about
Michelle: Well, I just want to talk maybe a little bit briefly about some of the work I've been doing together with SADA and with another community archive, the Texas After Violence Project. So, Texas After Violence Project TAVP has taken the lead on an IMLS grant called Virtual Belonging, that does a number of things and I'm the UCLA community archives lab, my doctoral student, who's amazing, Anna Robinson-Sweet and I are sort of the research component of the project.
So Anna Robinson -Sweet and I have been doing interviews with people who have shared their stories as part of these projects to get a sense of like, what motivates people to share their story? What does it feel like to share your story? And what we found is that just the act of telling your story after, particularly for those who are formerly incarcerated, but not just, um, is such an important transformative act, right?
We have this great quote that someone said, like, "it's as much for myself as for anyone else, even if no one ever listens to this story, it was important to me that I got to tell my story."
And so that has given us really a whole new way to think about the importance of record creation, that liberatory memory work isn't just about use, it's also about creating the record.
So who gets to create a record? Who gets to tell their story? Also, the power dynamic between the interviewer and the narrator is really important. And so in all of these projects, it's a peer to peer conversation, right? So it's someone who shares at least some vectors of identity, some mutual experiences that really enable, um, the narrators to fully tell their stories and to feel comfortable telling their stories. And then the final question is about, does it matter if oral histories happen over Zoom? And what we have found out is like, not really. For most people we've interviewed, some prefer Zoom because they're comfortable with the technology, they feel like they don't have to, um, be a host to somebody welcoming them into their house. They don't have to be a guest in someone else's house. And if that connection with the interviewer is there because of shared positionality then it really doesn't matter if the conversation is mediated over Zoom and not in person.
So that's the work that I, we've been working on the past year and we have another, another year coming up on that project. Um, and I'm really excited to be working on that project, particularly because it's research that is driven by the two community archives. So TAVP and SADA coming to me and saying we could use research on this.
And that's, for me, like, the ultimate of what I want my work to do is to be of use to support community based archives.
It's really trying to shift the dynamic where I used to say, like, I do research about community archives, and now I'm like, no, I do research in support of, alongside, together with, Community archives, and that's really where I want to be professionally.
Sophie: This sounds so amazing. I know we're all very excited about this project. I love the idea of doing our work alongside the organizations. Yes. Thank you, Michelle, for being on this show with us today. I really appreciate it thank you for all your time
Michelle: Thank you so much for asking, Sophie. It's been a delight.
Sophie: Oh, that is it for today's show. Big big, big, thanks to Michelle. What a wonderful conversation. I'm so excited to be back at this. We have a lot of great interviews coming up. If you would like to suggest somebody, if you would like to suggest yourself, please do reach out. You can find us: solidarity history dot O R G, where you can also find ways to support us if you would like. Until next time friends, let's be kind to ourselves and be kind to each other. Let's try to think about how we can use our skills to build a better world. Bye, y'all.