ABSTRACT  

On January 26, 2023 at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, the FSF Sussex team held a community archives forum, the second in the FSF series of community forums (the first held in Nov. 2022 in Dublin). Facilitated by Irene Fubara-Manuel, project Co-I, the session was designed as an open, informal conversation with members of a variety of local, and regional, critical community archives and heritage groups.  Participants (listed below and credited as contributors to this piece) provided some background to their work, and responded to prompts related to the challenges they, and their respective community heritage group, faced, as well as the type of support they envisaged useful from institutions and projects like Full Stack Feminism.

Overview

Hosted at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, we invited a number of critical community and archive managers, archivist, creators, and volunteers. The majority of participants were already known, or indeed had worked with, members of the the FSF Sussex team, and were asked to participate because they specifically worked heritage which represent traditional marginalised, silenced or erased histories. This sentiment was articulated in our invite to individuals as follows:

A key aim of our project is includ[ing] multiple voices and perspectives, to address multiple and intersecting forms of oppression. FSF seeks engagement with communities, particularly those communities that have been marginalised, excluded and silenced. For us this is a listening and learning exercise where we hope to learn from community digital archive practitioners.  

Individuals in attendance (and in no particular order) included:

• Veronica McKenzie - Haringey Vanguard ‘a BME LGBTQ+ History project focused on the history and contributions of Haringey-based community activists in the 1970s – 1990s, work whose influence was felt well beyond the borough’.

• Roni Guetta - Queer Heritage South/Queer in Brighton ‘ is a digital community archiving project, celebrating and promoting the rich cultural life of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ+) people in Brighton & Hove’.

• Rhoda Adum Boateng - Black Cultural Archives ‘collect, preserve and celebrate the histories of people of African and Caribbean descent in the UK and to inspire and give strength to individuals, communities, and society’.

• Topher Campbell - rukus! Archive aims ‘to collect, preserve, exhibit, and otherwise make available to the public historical, cultural, and artistic materials related to the Black lesbian, gay bisexual and trans communities in the United Kingdom’.

• Sarah Lee and Suchi Chatterje - Brighton and Hove Black History Group seeks ‘ to reveal Brighton & Hove’s hidden past and help local people get involved in mapping their own history of Brighton & Hove’.

• Erin James - 2023 Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow (University of Sussex)

• Paul Dudman - Living Refugee Archive ‘is home to a growing collection of resources relating to refugees and forced migration’.

• Members of FSF included: Irene Fubara-Manuel (Chair), Cécile Chevalier, and Sharon Webb.

We had a number of questions we intended to explore during the session: 

1. What motivated the establishment of the archive you are involved with?  

2. What challenges have you faced in creating and maintaining a community digital archive?  

3. What digital tools do you use?  

4. What is needed to make your work easier and to support community digital archives?  

5. What would you like to see in the Toolkit we are developing? 

Largely, however, these questions were answered without any prompting from the facilitator, leading to a free-flowing and informal conversation. This ease of discussion was a result of the rapport and mutual regard that had already been established between the participants and team members. Therefore, the forum offered a distinct experience for the participants to build solidarity with other community archivists and collectively reflect on their previous collaborations, and experiences (as described below), with institutions.

What follows is a summary of the conversation organised around a number of key themes and subjects.

Introduction and Motivations of Community Archives 

Community developed archives and histories  
frame us, hold us, sustain us, enrich us. 

Why do community archives archive?  

Community archives and archiving have many motivating factors. In discussion with participants, a particular motivation held in common was the impulse to make the invisible visible, and the importance of bearing witness to histories of trauma and joy.  Many discussed how they wanted to break the perception of archives as just dusty old papers. They instead wanted to celebrate archives as ‘the fabric of our lives’, and as a method to empower communities to curate their own narrative using community-defined terminology and language. Instead of appeasement to external institutional whims, community-curated archiving is seen as an act of reclamation and a means to regain control over historical narrative and heritage.  Community archives acknowledge that histories outside of the mainstream, are not a trend to be sidelined to a month, day, or a section of a museum. 

Connecting people to their heritage using digital tools and technologies, is a method for community archives to disrupt the power dynamics of traditional memory institutions. While actively curating and collecting, community archives challenge the policies of larger institutions, which have not prioritised inclusive forms of representation. However, despite the importance of community archives which hold and sustain underrepresented histories, they face several challenges that threaten their existence. 

Key Challenges and Insights

Digital archives are a freedom 

Given that community members might not have access to physical spaces where materials are stored, a common point was the promise and challenges of digitisation. On the one hand, having archives accessible online ensures archive materials are discoverable, and that archivist could avoid the additional labour of being a docent. On the other hand, chronic under-resourcing and under-funding of community archives, means that digitisation is often a costly process which cannot always be prioritised - in many instances, scarcity or lack of resources is normalised, so much so that digitisation work is seen as a luxury.  Additionally, while digital archives are perceived as a means to attain agency and autonomy, the resources required for their upkeep and long-term sustainability creates a sense of precariousness. Some participants discussed collaborations with large technology companies, the reliance on which resulted in feelings of exploitation (e.g. the use of archival materials to train machine learning or loss of metadata that properly contextualised important artefacts), and a sense of relinquishing control.

There was a notable tension around making data (or indeed community heritage) freely available to the communities represented in particular collections, and the need to charge large institutional for access. For examples, it was stated that institutions that use digital archives in teaching should pay an annual fee, or adopt a business business model similar to that of academic journals. This suggestion was discussed as a reason why a particular archive had not been digitised and developed into a digital archive - the crux of the argument being that if open access is the only model, how are small, under-funded community archives expected to exist in the long-term. Connecting this problem to that of academic journals behind paywalls is particularly astute - this is a model institutions adhere to despite the fact that authors do not get paid directly for these outputs but university libraries are subsequently charged astronomically prices for the research output of their own staff. Of course its little more nuanced than explain here, and there is a move to open access models (which also charge), but the point still stands. If we value heritage from community archives, how do ensure they are properly resourced.

We do not want crumbs, we want recognition 

The tension between autonomy and long-term sustainability of community archives also played out in the experiences of partnering with institutions, such as large heritage organisations, funding bodies, and higher education institutions, among others. In order to mitigate the risks associated with chronic under-funding, partnerships are essential for many community heritage groups. However, these partnerships were not without their problems and in many cases past experiences, which felt exploitive, one-sided, or indeed traumatic, have resulted in a reluctance to partner with certain bodies. Citing differing priorities and goals, as well as the perceived tyranny of institutional funding and unsettling experiences of power dynamics, many questioned the institutional motivation for partnerships. Indeed, some even questioned the categorisation of this relationship as a “partnership” as a power imbalance was often acutely felt. Many felt “secondary”, or exploited for strategic gain, in these partnerships. In some cases, institutional notions of “respectability” were at odds with forms of heritage expressed by some community groups. In these instances, communities felt judged rather than seen or recognised as an intrinsic part of wider cultural heritage work. This sense or experience of judgment reenforced the need for autonomy and agency, which is often gained at the expense of security.  

Our heritage is not your EDI policy! 

Expanding further on the issue of funding, participants often felt their work and that of their heritage group, was operationalised by institutions as part of EDI work rather than through a genuine want for collaboration.  Individuals were left feeling that their heritage was only a passing concern for the institution, with funding uncertainties exacerbating the sense of being subject to institutional whims and fleeting political concerns. Many felt their work existed on the periphery of institutional concerns, whilst being literally ‘caught up’ in the politics of inclusivity. These fleeting interactions, coupled with precarious funding, created uneven cycles of interactions and support.  

Conclusion and Further Considerations 

Given the tensions around archives and institutions, the overarching theme of the discussion was agency and autonomy. A stand out suggestion from the forum was the subscription model used in software development that ensures developers have a stable income to compensate for their labour and ongoing maintenance of a project. Applied to community archives, a subscription model where institutions pay for the use and maintenance of archives would provide more stability, resources for maintaining materials, and appropriately compensate archivist.

Participants suggested community workshops that would teach members DIY preservation of materials. This would ensure that communities have the last say on what they consider valuable for posterity.

Decentering large institutions to build solidarity and allyship across communities was another thread in the discussion of agency and autonomy. Participants highlighted the importance of peer learning and sharing as activist. An essential part of that peer-to- peer learning for community archivists is the knowledge of other archivists. As limited resources affects the visibility of existing archives, one of the participants proposed the idea of a resource map that would both document lesser known archives and also share learning tools mentioned above. Within this zone of solidarity and allyship, participants stressed the generative power of uncomfortable conversations amongst each other and with institutions. To hold these conversations, means to boldly and confidently take up space—an invaluable expression of agency that the participants also highlighted as an intangible skill to be learned and shared amongst community archivists.

While the guiding questions behind this forum pointed towards digitisation of community archives—the value, processes, and challenges—the discussion once again reinforced that digital technologies are inseparable from power. Any discussion of or with communities archives must then account for power imbalances and move towards tipping the scales to make sure that the archives that hold communities together are not exploited and have full agency outside of institutional influence.

Appendix

Summary of community forum, organised into 3 sections, and clustered into particular themes.