Fierce Compassion and Reflexivity

Transforming Practice at the University of Melbourne Archives

Authors

  • Rachel Tropea RMIT University Archives
  • Georgina Ward University of Melbourne Archives

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.121

Abstract

In 2016, the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) commenced a program of change with regard to its records about child welfare in Victoria. This was driven by a social justice imperative to repair past harms done to Care Leavers (people who grew up in orphanages, children's homes, or foster care) while in out-of-home care, and for whom records play an integral role. UMA worked with Care Leavers, advocacy groups and support services to review their policies, procedures and practices around archival documentation and access arrangements. In this article, the authors explore those efforts through the prism of radical empathy (or rather a compassionate response to empathy) and analyze what was achieved and the challenges that remain. 

Pre-print first published online 10/22/2021

Author Biographies

Rachel Tropea, RMIT University Archives

Rachel Tropea is the Archivist and Senior Coordinator at RMIT University Archives. Prior to this, she was a research archivist at the University of Melbourne. Most of Rachel's experience has been in the “action research” space, working on nationwide projects involving community, practitioners and researchers. This includes the Who Am I? and Find & Connect projects with people who grew up in out-of-home care in their quest to find out about their childhood, and, on another project with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to repatriate ancestral remains from museums, collecting institutions (including at Universities) and private collections, back to their community of origin.

Georgina Ward, University of Melbourne Archives

Georgina Ward is an Archivist at the University of Melbourne Archives where she supports archival services and works on a range of activities and projects which traverse the key areas of collection development, collection management and access and outreach. She is responsible for the release of records to Care Leavers. Georgina has a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) and a Graduate Diploma in Information Management. 

Downloads

Published

2022-03-12

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2021): Radical Empathy in Archival Practice

Section

Perspectives

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Rachel Tropea, Georgina Ward

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

JCLIS is open access in publication, politics, and philosophy. In a world where paywalls are the norm for access to scholarly research, the Journal recognizes that removal of barriers to accessing information is key to the production and sharing of knowledge.

Authors retain intellectual property and copyright of manuscripts published in JCLIS, and JCLIS applies a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial) license to published articles. If an article is republished after initial publication in JCLIS, the republished article should indicate that it was first published by JCLIS.