Digital Archives as Decolonial Practice

Abstract

Traditional academic research often relies on the violence of extraction—the taking of people, resources, goods, and ideas from the marginalized in order to serve the needs of those in power. Community-engaged research requires academics to reject extractive forms of knowledge acquisition and relegate authority and control of project processes and outcomes to the participating community members. The collaboration between the Oral History Lab (OHL) at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM) and the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico (AREPR)—which includes teams at Michigan State University and UPR Río Piedras—has afforded us the opportunity to re-vision digital archives as spaces for communities to self-narrate their lived experiences with disaster and survival. Our proposed webinar traces the lines of community archiving as decolonial practice through our linked projects, including aspects of archives and pedagogy, access to archives, community archives, and collaborative archiving strategies. Our working model leads to the creation of archival collections shaped by the community and characterized by a high degree of accessibility and immediate relevance, which can serve as tools for transformation by preserving and disseminating the perspectives, lived experiences, and work of individuals and community organizations who do not traditionally have access to public discourses. This presentation includes discussion of: (a) The relevant courses at UPRM, which culminate in digitally archiving students’ oral history projects, a model that has demonstrated significant pedagogical value as it strengthens students’ sense of agency by placing them in the role of creators of new primary sources with enduring value while underscoring their connectivity to their home communities across the archipelago. (b) The OHL “Speaking into Silences” project—funded by a Digital Justice Development grant from the ACLS—which brings together four mutual aid organizations from across the Puerto Rican archipelago to create onsite digital archives with mirror collections housed in the UPRM repository. Each local site will develop a public-facing digital output that bridges to the larger archive, such as a geospatial map, playlist, or calendar. (c) How AREPR—a collaborative, multilingual oral history storytelling project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—utilizes methodologies grounded in community archiving and digital humanities to center community knowledges in active fieldwork; a process that both uplifts local experiences and has the potential to reshape the ways in which researchers envision their research projects as people-first, socially-conscious, and non-extractive.