This weekend, I attended my first academic conference: From Marginalization to Visibility: 2SLGBTQ+ Archives and Public Memory put on by The Arquives. The goal of the conference was to explore various topics in archiving through a queer lens, examining existing biases in GLAM institutions and academic fields, sharing experiences in queering the archives, and sharing community with others doing this hard work.
I will say up front, I am not an archivist. I’m in school learning about information management, which includes some content related to archiving, but it is not the focus of my academic track nor my intended area of practice after graduation. That said, I am queer, the people doing this work are my community, the archives they create and maintain are love letters to my community. I wanted to learn more about who creates and maintains these archives, how they do it, why they do it. I wanted to learn about how these archives could help me understand my own history, and how I might intersect my work with theirs.
I attended several sessions throughout the weekend, taking breaks when I needed to. Some of the sessions were presentations of research or case studies, some talked about personal experiences working in queer archives or working in archives as a queer person, some were imaginings of how things might be different, and some were hands-on workshops intended to help archivists practice practical skills. I tried to choose at least one of each to attend.
Two of the sessions I attended were focused on digital preservation and digital archives. Hearing about how VHS tapes were digitized was interesting, but the ethical implications were the meat of that talk. If someone was on home video, what circumstances would make it okay for that video to be posted on the internet and accessible to all? In many of these small communities, someone could be identified by a face or a voice even if their name isn’t included in the archive’s metadata. Even people no longer with us deserve respect and privacy, as do their families and community. The other talk was much more practical in focus, discussing how one chooses software to run a digital archive, website hosting requirements, and the basics of social media presence.
One session was a personal account of a non-archivist who felt called to document the ongoing harm in Alberta to trans youth as their access to healthcare and safe social and school environments is being dismantled all around them. The focus of the archiving was to capture the lived experiences of these youth, rather than the efforts of activists or policymakers or parents or teachers.
The last session I’ll discuss was on the intersection of archiving and activism. It examined archiving as a form of direct activism, the archiving of non-archival activism, and the synergy and conflict that can arise for individuals and groups who wish to engage in both. One thing I really appreciated about this one was the engagement aspect, where participants were asked to brainstorm ways that archiving could be an activist activity and to talk about their personal experiences where the roles of archivist and activist have intersected.
It was an interesting mix: practical information about the technical and ethical aspects of archiving for marginalized communities, the centring of the most marginalized members of those communities, and a reflexive lens through which to view past, current, and future work. It parallels well with a framework one of the presenters introduced me to, the Four Pillars of Social Justice model developed by the Miami Worker’s Center and expanded on by Dean Spade. The four pillars are Consciousness (drawing attention to issues in community and society, awareness), Policy (of organizations, communities, government agencies and laws), Service (meeting the basic needs of the community), and Power (centring the most marginalized to push towards equity).
Sadly, there were some talks I’d hoped to see but wasn’t able to. The conference was a hybrid affair, and I had opted to attend online (a good choice given that I only saw one person masking on camera the whole weekend). As usual, there were technical issues with the video conferencing software, where audio would cut out or attendees would be stuck in the online waiting room and would miss the first third of a talk. I would have liked to attend one of the policy-focused sessions and learned more about Indigenous perspectives on queer archiving. I also had some trouble focusing during some of the sessions; there’s something to be said for being in a distraction-free environment like the in-person folks had. In the future I’d work on creating such a space for myself, given that in-person attendance isn’t an option for me for health reasons.
Even so, I think it was a good experience. I learned a lot from the talks I did attend that I can take with me into my work as an activist and an information manager, even if I’m not working directly in an archive. And who knows, perhaps I’ll end up in one someday as something more than a patron.