CfP: Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance

Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance

Special Issue of The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies

Editors: Michelle Caswell, UCLA and Jess Melvin, University of Sydney

 

Records documenting human rights abuse raise a host of critical challenges for archivists, scholars, activists, survivors, and source communities. Who owns such records? Which stakeholders have the legal and/or ethical authority to make decisions about their stewardship? When should community-based collections, personal records, oral histories or artistic expressions comment on, respond to, or fill in the gaps left by official state documentation? 

 

Dominant Western archival theories trace the provenance of records to their creators. By this narrow estimation, many records documenting human rights abuse belong to the abusers who created them or successor states. However, recent developments in critical archival studies challenge dominant Western notions of provenance, expanding it (as in community or social provenance) (Bastian 2009, Douglas 2017), retooling it for liberatory aims such as crip provenance (Brilmyer 2022), land as provenance (Ghaddar 2022), or provenancial fabulation (Lapp 2023), or abandoning it altogether (Drake 2021). A recent special issue of Archival Science edited by Jeannette Bastian, Stanley Griffin, and James Lowry addresses emerging conceptions of provenance in detail.  

 

This renewed interest in provenance has opened up critical questions as provenance relates specifically to the ownership, stewardship, and uses of records documenting human rights abuse. This special issue of The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies will exclusively feature papers produced at the Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance symposium at the University of Sydney in June 2025. The symposium was organized as part of the Indonesia Trauma Testimony Project made possible with support from the Australian Research Council. 

 

Submission due date: September 1, 2025

Anticipated publication date: Spring 2026

 

 

References

 

Bastian J (2006) Reading colonial records through an archival lens: the provenance of place, space and creation. Arch Sci 6: 267-284.

 

Brilmyer G (2022) Toward a crip provenance: centering disability in archives through its absence. J Contemporary Arch Stud 9:1-25

 

 

Douglas J (2017) Origins and beyond. In: MacNeil H & Eastwood T (eds.) Currents of Archival Thinking (2nd. ed) Libraries Unlimited, California. pp 25-52

 

Drake J (2016) RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description. Medium. https://medium.com/on-archivy/radtech-meets-radarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-and-archival-description-568f133e4325

 

Ghaddar JJ (2022) Provenance in place: crafting the Vienna Convention for global decolonization and archival repatriation. In: Lowry J (ed.) Disputed Archival Heritage. Routledge, London, pp 49-86

 

Lapp J (2023) ’The only way we know how’: provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials. Arch Sci 23:117-136