The Social Movement Archive

"Examines the role of cultural production within social justice struggles and within archives. Contains reproductions of political ephemera, including zines, banners, stickers, posters, and memes, alongside 15 interviews with artists and activists who have worked across a range of movements including: women's liberation, disability rights, housing justice, Black liberation, anti-war, Indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights, and prisoner abolition, among others."--Provided by publisher.

The rise of digitisation and social media over the past decade has fostered the rise of participatory and DIY digital culture. Likewise, the archival community leveraged these new technologies, aiming to engage users and expand access to collections. This book examines the creation and development of participatory archives, its impact on archival theory, and present case studies of its real world application. Participatory Archives is divided into four sections with each focused on a particular aspect of participatory archives: social tagging and commenting; transcription; crowdfunding; and outreach & activist communities. Each section includes chapters summarizing the existing literature, a discussion of theoretical challenges and benefits, and a series of case studies. The case studies are written by a range of international practitioners and provide a wide range of examples in practice, whilst the remaining chapters are supplied by leading scholars from Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This book will be useful for students on archival studies programs, scholarly researchers in archival studies who could use the book to frame their own research projects, and practitioners who might be most interested in the case studies to see how participatory archives function in practice. The book may also be of interest to other library and information science students, and similar audiences within the broader cultural heritage institution fields of museums, libraries, and galleries.

This book traces the trajectory of the community archives movement, expanding the definition of community archives to include sites such as historical societies, social movement organisations and community centres. It also explores new definitions of what community archives might encompass, particularly in relation to disciplines outside the archives. Over ten years have passed since the first volume of Community Archives, and inspired by continued research as well as by the formal recognition of community archives in the UK, the community archives movement has become an important area of research, recognition and appreciation by archivists, archival scholars and others worldwide. Increasingly the subject of papers and conferences, community archives are now seen as being in the vanguard of social concerns, markers of community-based activism, a participatory approach exemplifying the on-going evolution of ‘professional’ archival (and heritage) practice and integral to the ability of people to articulate and assert their identity. Community Archives, Community Spaces reflects the latest research and includes practical case studies on the challenges of building and sustaining community archives. This new book will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and academics in the archives and records community as well as to historians and other scholars concerned with community building and social issues.

Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice expands the burgeoning literature on archival social justice and impact. Illuminating how diverse factors shape the relationship between archives, recordkeeping systems, and recordkeepers, this book depicts struggles for different social justice objectives. Discussions and debates about social justice are playing out across many disciplines, fields of practice, societal sectors, and governments, and yet one dimension cross-cutting these actors and engagement spaces has remained unexplored: the role of recordkeeping and archiving. To clarify and elaborate this connection, this volume provides a rigorous account of the engagement of archives and records—and their keepers—in struggles for social justice. Drawing upon multidisciplinary praxis and scholarship, contributors to the volume examine social justice from historical and contemporary perspectives and promote impact methodologies that align with culturally responsive, democratic, Indigenous, and transformative assessment. Underscoring the multiplicity of transformative social justice impacts influenced by recordmaking, recordkeeping, and archiving, the book presents nine case studies from around the world that link the past to the present and offer pathways towards a more just future. Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice will be an essential reading for researchers and students engaged in the study of archives, truth and reconciliation processes, social justice, and human rights. It should also be of great interest to archivists, records managers, and information professionals.

For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.

In this book, the author explores the key theoretical issues in the study of social movements through a series of case studies, including the aboriginal rights movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, the environmental movement, and the global justice movement.