CFP: Archiving Against Genocide: A Global Indigenous Conversation

CFP for Special Issue of Journal of Critical Library & Information Studies

Archiving Against Genocide: A Global Indigenous Conversation

 

Deadline: January 7, 2026

 

Contact: Dr. Jamila J. Ghaddar (director@archiveslab.org)

 

Key Dates (TBC):

• Deadline for submissions: January 7, 2026
• Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2026
• Revisions due: May 15, 2026
• Publication of issue: August 2026

 

Guest Editorial Collective:

• Jamila Ghaddar, Assistant Professor, Media Studies Dept., University of Amsterdam; and Founding Director, Archives & Digital Media Lab
• Kirstan Thorpe, Associate Professor, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research, University of Technology Sydney; and lead at the Indigenous Archives and Data Stewardship Hub
• Rula Shahwan, Director, Library Archives, Arab American University - Ramallah Campus, Palestine; and PhD candidate, Goethe University
• Rose Miyonga, PhD candidate, University of Warwick
• Hanine Shehadeh, Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities, NY Abu Dhabi
• Sony Prosper, PhD Candidate, University of Michigan
• Mariam Karim, Global Postdoctoral Scholar, Institute of Advanced Study in the Global South, Northwestern University in Qatar
• Raymond Frogner, Head of Archives, National Center for Truth & Reconciliation
• Rami Zurayk, Professor of Ecosystem Management, Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, American University of Beirut

 

** In the lead up to the special issue, the Guest Editorial Collective is working with local and global partners to host a virtual symposium related to the theme. Join the Archives & Digital Media Lab mailing list at (www.archiveslab.org) for updates.**

 

Over 22 months into the livestreamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and of escalating aggression and war across Palestine and West Asia, the world has been starkly and painfully reminded that global white power is built on and requires ongoing genocides. Settler colonialism, with its annihilating drive, is as world-making to western modernity as it is world-shattering to indigenous[1] and native societies. From the transatlantic slave trade that funded Europe’s industrial revolutions and enlightenments; to the “bloodied soil of genocide” (Grande 2015/2004, p.32) of Indigenous nations across the Americas and Pacific on which white nations like Canada are built; to the engineered famines and sadistic partitions that reconfigure land and people across Asia, the archives and archival profession have offered epistemicide and settler amnesia to enable and institutionalize the erasure of entire societies, groups and life worlds. We mark this urgent moment for Palestine and humanity by convening a global indigenous conversation on archiving against genocide through this Call for Proposals for a special issue of Journal of Critical Library & Information Studies. This special issue speaks to the gap in archival science on the topic of genocide, one that severely disadvantages archival scholars and professionals who are working in contexts of genocide and ethnic cleansing (Ghaddar 2025).

 

Curated by an international Guest Editorial Collective of indigenous, native, colonized and racialized people from around the world, this special issue also calls on the global archival community to act in solidarity and alliance with all those under conditions of genocide by helping us collectively think through and imagine how archives and archiving can intervene against the annihilation of peoples and epistemologies. As archivists and memory workers worldwide continue to sign A Call to Archive Against Genocide: Archivists & Memory Workers in Solidarity with Palestine & Palestinian Colleagues, this special issue convenes an international conversation grounded in solidarity and directed toward liberation. At its core, it seeks to address the fundamental question of how we can centre the right of Indigenous and colonised people to deconstruct and decolonise their archives; to create their counter narratives; to realise their right to a liberated epistemology about their history and truth; and to regather their fragmented archives and documentary heritage. It centres indigenous and Global South archival and research methods; as well as explorations of grassroots and/or community methodologies and how they can be centred in archival theory and practice. It insists on affirming the right to self-determination and self-representation in the design, implementation, and management of archival and heritage interventions as community members, allies, and co-conspirators. It connects decolonizing archives and archiving against genocide to the affirmation of native sovereignty, the safeguarding of indigenous life, land back, return, reparations, survivance, resurgence, healing, and liberation. We invite submissions on these topics in places and locales across the Global South.

 

We welcome submissions that consider questions such as: How can we do liberatory memory work under conditions of neoliberalism, globalisation, and late racial capital? How can we draw on anticolonial, antiracist, feminist, and community-centred models to avoid the pitfalls of white guilt and racist, paternalistic benevolence? How can we archive and activate the history of indigenous peoples and places as a celebration of sacrifice and resistance in defiance of racist, self-serving settler colonial frameworks? How can we produce a counter-narrative based on documentary heritage and archives? In what ways can models and practices of South-South and South-North solidarity and collaboration help us articulate a deeper, more meaningful decolonial archival praxis? How can we draw on key international, regional and national texts, documents, conventions, calls, statements, and laws to address these complex issues and conundrums, such as the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives & Debt (UN 1983); Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN 2007); Call to Action: Archiving State-Sanctioned Violence Against Black People (2020); The Adelaide-Tandanya Declaration (International Council on Archives 2020); and Position Statement on the Right of Reply to Indigenous Knowledges & Information Held in Archives (Indigenous Archives Collective 2021); and A Call to Archive Against Genocide: Archivists & Memory Workers in Solidarity with Palestine & Palestinian Colleagues (Documentary Nakba Reading Group 2024)?

 

Formats include but are not limited to: Academic articles (6,000-8,000 words); Opinion pieces (2,000-3,000 words); Interviews; Calls to Action; Manifestos; Open letters; Petitions; Standards, guidelines, and schemas; Annotated bibliographies; Edited transcripts of academic, professional or public events, including (paper presentations, roundtables, panels, keynote addresses, etc.);

Reviews of books and relevant documents/instruments, including standards, declarations, and position statements.; and Artistic or creative pieces.

 

Other format proposals are welcome; contact us at (director@archiveslab.org). 

 

References:

J.J. Ghaddar (2025) Palestine as Provenance: Archiving Against Genocide from Gaza to South  

Lebanon (Jabal Amil). Archival Science 25, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-025-09484-y [open source].

Sandy Grande (2015/2004) Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought, 10th edition
            (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers).

 

[1] While it is the convention in Turtle Island/North America and other literature within the Anglosphere to capitalize ‘Indigenous,’ a practice maintained in this CFP, the use of the lower case ‘i’ elsewhere indicates a more diverse and globally inclusive range of understandings of indigeneity, as well as scholarly and activist practices and linguistic conventions. In regards Palestine, for example, there is often a tendency to differentiate between being “indigenous to the land” and “indigenous” as distinct from the more specific meaning and connotations of being “Indigenous” to, for example, Turtle Island or Aotearoa/New Zealand.