From “dominant” to “community” archives: a new way of shaping collective memory
In her work, the American archival scholar Michelle Caswell unpacks the colonial roots of dominant archival infrastructures and focuses on how community archives can resist such legacies. In particular, she’s looked at how community archives can help LGBTQ communities, indigenous groups, and African Americans document and shape their own histories and memories, on their own terms. We asked her about this people-centric approach to archives, how it can lead to more inclusive narratives, and what lessons might apply in Ukraine.
What does community archiving mean? Why is it relevant, and how does it differ from traditional, established archiving?
It's a question that I still grapple with after fifteen years of working on community archives. In some ways, if we take this notion literally, every archive is a community archive because it involves groups of people. In the past, in the dominant western mode of thinking about archives, the focus was on the stuff and not on the people, but there's been a big paradigm shift in the field in the last twenty years. Now, the focus is on people and looking at how best to serve them: why people create records, how they create them, how they decide what they want or don't want to keep, and then how people use those records.
So in that sense, if we think broadly of a community as a group of people, any archive is a community archive. Within archival studies, the term community-based archive really emerged in 2009 with Andrew Flinn's work. Andrew Flinn uses very broad definitions. For him, a community is any group of people who call themselves a “community,” and a community archive is the attempt to document the history of their commonality.
In the context in which I work in the United States, I'm particularly interested in community archives that are independent and autonomous. By independent, I mean not part of a university, not part of a larger agency or organization, but operating independently: sustaining archives financially, staffing-wise, labor-wise, space-wise. It enables a sense of autonomy in which communities themselves make decisions about what to keep, what to preserve, how to describe it, and who will use the archive.
For me, the division is dominant archives vs. community-based archives, rather than traditional archives vs. community archives. When we talk about dominance, we're already getting at the heart of power relations — that's key to talking about community archives. Community archives are not new. They have existed for millennia, anywhere that communities want to document themselves. In that sense, they are traditional.
What distinguishes community-based archives from dominant archives is that all the work is done by the community that has been minoritized, marginalized, and left out of dominant archives.
Could elaborate a bit more on what dominant means here?
Archival studies as a formal field emerge from a dominant western bureaucratic tradition. It emerges from government bureaucrats trying to figure out how to maintain records of government actions. The bulk of dominant western archival theory makes all sorts of assumptions that do not apply to community archives. Its focus is not on individuals, not on families, not on community members. These record-keeping processes were very much part of the colonial enterprise.
The practices of the dominant western archival tradition are rooted in systems of oppression and colonialism, colonization, and using records to further those aims.
You mentioned that community archives, on one hand, have their own autonomy and agency in what and how to preserve, as well as how to provide access. At the same time, community archiving also presents challenges of sustainability, preservation, funding, staff, expertise, and so on. Do you see any points of connection or possible cooperation between the dominant archival infrastructure and community archives?
Since the beginning of the current Trump administration, it has been very clear that universities, museums, libraries and archives of all types in the United States are under threat. It has always been a false assumption that university-based or government archives are inherently more sustainable than community archives.
Universities and government agencies have not been safe and sustainable spaces for collections of records documenting minoritized communities. Anything involving a minoritized community has been underfunded historically at American universities or government agencies and is absolutely under attack right now. The Trump administration has scrubbed websites and removed any historical reference to people of color or LGBTQ communities.
Unfortunately, that has come to light in a really horrific way in recent months. Сommunity archives provide an autonomy: ways that communities can decide for themselves what is important to document. But that autonomy comes at a cost in terms of raising money, paying for staff, space, for the basics.
On the other hand, community archives have existed for centuries without funding support from dominant institutions and government agencies. Only in the past ten years have we been able to convince government funding agencies and private foundations that community archives are worthy of support. Now, I think, we need to find inspiration from those pre-government funding days in terms of fundraising.
I think it is possible for universities and community archives to work together. I’m primarily affiliated with a university. I'm a professor at a university and I do lots of work with community archives. But I think we have to be really careful about power relations because universities are now under attack. Universities have a history of extracting and oppressing, and shutting out members of minoritized communities. So if you're a representative of a university and you want to work with a community archive, I think the first thing you need to do is look at what the relationship is between your institution and that community. Is it a relationship of trust?
Trust is really hard to gain but easy to lose. You can lose trust overnight. The first thing is to look at the inequity, the imbalance of power between the community archive and the university, to be very open, upfront and honest about it. I think there are then several principles to follow. Equity is certainly one of them: transferring resources from universities to community archives, paying people for their expertise goes a long way, really partnering with community archives from the very start as equal partners in designing research projects, and then sharing the results of that research back with the community.
Speaking of trust, I sometimes see, among historians, a degree of skepticism about working outside established archival infrastructures. To what extent can community archives be seen as professional? Can different types of biases be present in the records? How can they be made credible?
We have to think about who the archive is for. For academic archives, the primary user group is academic researchers. Academic archives are primarily for historians, people writing history.
Community-based archives are not necessarily for professional historians. They are for members of the community to see themselves in history, to see someone who looks like them in history, or to learn past strategy, past activism, what worked and what didn’t. In some cases, historians are members of the community as well and are welcomed in. But community archives don't need to abide by the same kinds of rules of evidence that were established in dominant western modes of thinking about history, because that's not who they're for.
That said, I think all archives are biased. Historians would do really well to question the credibility of any record anywhere, regardless of whether it's in a national archive, a university archive or a small community-based archive. I would never just take at face value any record that I found anywhere.
One of the beautiful things about archives is the emphasis on context. Anywhere you're accessing a record, you should think about the context of its creation and preservation and the context of it being made acceptable. Who created it and why, who preserved it and why, for whom is it set up, and why?
I don't think community archives are really any different in that regard. We need to think about the very definition of what a record is. In dominant archival theory, a record had to be fixed, and it had to be material. An oral history, someone telling their story in and of itself, was not considered a record. It only became a record once recorded and materialized, and fixed. That's a very dominant western way of seeing the world. If we open up our minds to thinking about traditions that have arisen in the context of community archives, we have to entirely redefine what a record is and what an archive is.
I use a very broad definition of a “record”; it is potential evidence of human activity that crosses space and time. For me, that definition opens up the possibility of oral records, of kinetic records. Records don't just look like stuff in boxes or files on a hard drive. Any potential evidence that's passed across generations can be a record. Community archives have known this for centuries. They are based on values and philosophies, and ideas that emerge from within their own communities.
In your book, Urgent Archives, you mention the role of memory work in and for the present as opposed to a linear understanding of temporality and some abstract future. How do you see the role of community archives in the context of the Trump administration’s decisions regarding the National Archives and Records Administration, removing public records? It also affects the situation in Ukraine because some public records put at risk directly document Russian crimes in Ukraine.
I think community archives are more important than ever. They're also more endangered than ever, precisely because of how important they are.
We need to be searching through community archives right now to see how people survived oppression in the past. If we look at the work of archives, we will find inspiration: many people have suffered forms of oppression, and many have survived it. So what strategies did they use to fight it? What worked? What didn't work? What can we learn from that experience? In moments of crisis like this, we need to find moments of joy in archives, moments that are inspiring and will help us to keep living our lives.
Community archives in the US right now face an interesting dilemma, thinking long term. Is now the time to be out there, open, and to make everything accessible, or is now the time to recede a little in order to preserve the records, which doesn't mean stopping the work? I know a lot of LGBTQ archives face this decision right now. How present do we want to be? Or do we want to recede for our own safety and security? It means protecting our community first and foremost. It's really shocking to be having this conversation. But in some ways, community archives are prepared to do this work because they have lived through it before. They have been resilient for centuries, and they will continue to be resilient, despite all of the oppression and erasure that they're facing.
I can see similar strategies in some of the archiving done in Ukraine. Some initiatives document atrocities and war crimes. But because of the sensitivity of these testimonies and records, they tend to be kepthidden at the moment, not very visible to a broader public. This strategy of working silently is a priority right now.
The term community archiving is not really present in Ukraine’s academic discourse, but the phenomenon itself has existed since 2014 and especially since 2022. Communities and activists launched their own documenting and archiving initiatives. A certain archival turn has been happening here, in a sense. In other contexts and regions, similar phenomena have different names. In Latin America this is called “informal archives”, as my colleague Ian Kisil Marino put it, in the context of COVID-19. Could you elaborate on this global or transnational outlook?
I think it's a basic human impulse to assert, “I am here”. This assertion is what community archives do at a very basic level.
The term “community archives” is a very imperfect term. I like to be more specific and use the term “minoritized identity-based community archive”, which is really long, clunky and academic. What unites all of the projects I'm interested in around the world is this assertion of a presence of a group deprived of power. Because if you belong to a dominant group, that assertion is already baked into power structures.
But who knows, maybe someone else can come up with a better term for it — in English, at least. Terms are shifting, concepts are shifting, which is something that I absolutely love about archival studies. We've inherited a dominant western tradition, and in the past twenty years we’ve exploded that tradition and now everything is fair game. All of the concepts can be rewritten. In some cases, that is very frustrating, but also really exciting.
Is it possible to have solidarity and networking between multiple community archives? Could the assertion “I am here” serve as a unifying principle for such diverse initiatives?
This is starting to happen in the United States. There is a group called the Community Archives Collaborative, a mutual aid association of community archives in the US. The idea is that people involved in community archives — the LGBTQ community, Black Indigenous, leftist political activists — get together and learn from each other, share practices, information, maybe even equipment, and apply for grants together.
It would be fantastic if that could emerge globally.
In my research I try to understand the connection between community archiving and social media archiving. How do digital platforms influence how we preserve our cultural memory, cultural heritage?
Community archives can be a very powerful antidote to corporate social media platforms. There's often confusion when people say, “I have a community archive: it's my Instagram account or it's my Facebook page”.
From an archival studies perspective, social media platforms are not archives in and of themselves. They're profit makers for the corporations that own them. Here's where our definitions are really important. Social media platforms are certainly collections of records. But for me, they're not archives because there is no commitment to preserve them in the long term. They will only be preserved as long as it's profitable for the corporations.
Taking the records that are generated on those corporate social media platforms off of those platforms and preserving them — that would be an archival project.
Are you familiar with any initiatives doing this kind of work, basically community archives focused on preserving social media data?
In the US, what comes to mind is Documenting the Now and Archiving the Black Web, which are projects of an organization called Shift Collective.
Documenting the Now emerged in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and was trying to figure out how to preserve tweets related to it. Soon they figured out that technically it's quite possible to preserve those tweets, but ethically, how do you do it? The ethical questions are extremely important: when people create social media records, they're often not thinking about the long term. They're not thinking about the consequences. They're often not thinking about ways that records might harm or jeopardize someone's safety. We should be prioritizing the safety of vulnerable communities over preserving their records.
