The proposed panel engages with archival tensions around openness in archival collections, spaces, and research from a variety of geographic and cultural perspectives and within different contexts from community archives to teaching with K-12 students. As openness continues to be centred as a professional value, we acknowledge the considerable work that has gone into questioning when openness is or is not appropriate or needs to be more nuanced, especially in the context of records by and/or about Indigenous peoples and historically neglected populations and subject to community protocols. Centring an ethics of care, our panel will engage in these nuanced discussions of openness in archives. Questions asked and responded to will include what are the affective and ethical dimensions of openness in personal and community archives, and how do or can archival practices and collections consider the needs and realities of historically marginalized and/or vulnerable creators and subjects. Each panelist will give a ten-minute presentation (outlined below), leaving thirty minutes for audience q&a. We will come prepared with questions to ask each other to start the discussion if no questions are forthcoming from the floor.

Panelists:

Itza A. Carbajal
University of Washington, iSchool

Considering the marginal presence of young people (meaning those not yet in college or university settings) in archival spaces, collections, and history, this panelist brings to light a few instances of how youth records and young archival users and subjects can participate in the archival field. In particular, Carbajal will discuss multiple instances of K-12 enrichment courses focused on personal and community histories and how the absence of young people in archives has negatively impacted both students and instructor. For young archival users in particular, access may not simply mean “open” collections but also equity in representation, expectations on literacy or digital skills, as well as overall physical space accommodations Openness then as it relates to audiences, community outreach, or access then begs the question as to whether the archival profession is ready physically, content-wise, and culturally to welcome and make room for some of our youngest yet highly neglected populations.

Anna Sexton
University College London

Considering what an ethics of care means when stewarding collections that document mental health lived experience, this panel contribution reflects on the opening of the Audrey Amiss Archive at the Wellcome Library in London and the ethical tensions and competing claims that arise when deeply personal archives of this kind become, first institutionalised, and then opened out for interpretation and re-use. In exploring the ethical tensions that sit around the representation of Audrey and her archive in the recently released film ‘Typist, Artist, Pirate, King’, this contribution opens up questions around affect, power, control, ownership and responsibility when deceased lives are given afterlives that extend out from their archives into ever expanding contexts of representation and reuse.

Jamie A. Lee
University of Arizona

This presentation centers the P. Carl Transitional Eyewear eyeglass collection – 28 pairs of eyeglasses belong to someone, someone who has transitioned through a myriad of gender identities to an imperfect space he calls home today – as a distinct site for interrogating the paradoxical notion of fixity to challenge the concept and practice of stereotype through P. Carl's own (un)becoming subjectivities. Through theorizing the notion of the stereotype this presentation moves from assumptions of fixity to explore the ambivalence of the un-fixed, especially in the records' multiplicity across both physical and digital contexts. Rather than the assumed certainties that stereotypes can inspire and that fixed archival records seemingly confirm, the role of archival ambivalence makes room for complex personhood in the archives. Engaging complex personhood as a creative tool, the archives are opened in new ways to understand people as living complicated, dynamic lives that cannot be captured and viewed as forever fixed and unchanging. This presentation is meant as a playful unsettling through the ambivalences that a focus on the unfixed reveals.

Jennifer Douglas
University of British Columbia

This presentation will draw from research in the Lara Gilbert fonds at the University of Victoria Archives, from interviews with artist Sonja Ahlers about her personal archives, and from a recent exhibition by Ahlers of archival materials. Gilbert’s archives document experiences of sexual abuse, while Ahlers' archival exhibition made evident instances and effects of inappropriate sexual behaviours that, she explains, were more visible to her when she looked back on the archives she created and accumulated as a younger woman in the 1990s and early 2000s through a 2020s “Me Too” lens. The presentation will consider the affective impact of creating and preserving materials that document sexual abuse; the ways in which archival collections can function as evidentiary constructions in the pursuit of justice and/or validation; and the ethical dilemmas that arise when perpetrators are also records creators. A key question the presentation raises is how to manage - from a preservation and access perspective - archives that reveal themselves over time to be full of questionable actors and problematic behaviours.