Michelle Caswell and Anna Robinson-Sweet Win 2023 ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition

UCLA Professor of Information Studies Michelle Caswell and Anna Robinson-Sweet, a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Information Studies) have been honored by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) with the 2023 ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition award. Their paper, “’It Was as Much for Me As for Anybody Else’: The Creation of Self-Validating Records,” was chosen by ALISE for its examination of community-led archival and oral history projects such as the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) and the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). Caswell and Robinson-Sweet’s research will be presented at the 2023 ALISE Annual Conference, held October 2-5, 2023 in Milwaukee. The paper has also been published in The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies.

“The research study employed community-led participatory action research to investigate an important and timely topic,” states the ALISE committee review of the paper. “It was powerful to read about the concept of radical record creation … empowering those who have been disempowered to control their own narratives. The findings have implications for participatory oral history projects and on the impact of community archives.”

Professor Caswell and Robinson-Sweet are part of a three-year community-led participatory action research project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and titled, “Virtual Belonging: Assessing the Affective Impact of Digital Records Creation in Community Archives.” A research team formed from TAVP, the principal investigator of the project, SAADA, and the UCLA Community Archives Lab, are seeking answers to questions about the impact of community archives, and to implement emotionally responsive oral history projects based on the findings. The award-winning paper is the first to emerge from the project, reporting on initial data on the emotional impact of record creation on those who share their stories with TAVP or SAADA. The paper also outlines the goals of holistically assessing the impact of community archives and of providing care and support for minoritized people who narrate and record oral histories for archives.   

Professor Caswell is the co-director of the UCLA Community Archives Lab and a co-founder of SAADA. Robinson-Sweet has served as an archivist for The New School Archives and has been involved in archival projects at the Weeksville Heritage Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

How does this work align with the archival field on trauma-based archives?

Michelle Caswell: Our work pushes the field forward in several areas. First, theis project is not just aboutcommunity archives, but is led by community archives. In the past ten or 15 years, there has been more academic interest in doing research about community archives and taking them seriously. It’s really important that the research is driven by the needs of those archives themselves, not purely by academic interest. 

Gabriel Solís from the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP), who was a UC Regents Fellow last year, approached me and said that he would like this research to be done. I had previously done a lot of work about the emotional impact of archives on users. He said it would be really useful for TAVP to have research on and language to talk about the emotional impact of creating a record for those participate in oral history projects and, secondly, if it matters for oral history records [to be created] over Zoom rather than in person. We're also working on creating a toolkit so that other community archives and organizations can create their own oral history projects.

Anna Robinson-Sweet is a doctoral student researcher in the UCLA Department of Information Studies. Courtesy of Anna Robinson-Sweet

This research was done in conjunction with my doctoral student, Anna Robinson-Sweet, who is amazing. There is a great sensitivity in the way she does interviews, particularly with the Texas After Violence Project community. This is the start of the third year of a three-year project. We’re still collecting data, doing more interviews. So far, the data that we're getting suggests that it doesn't matter much if oral histories are taken via Zoom. In fact, some narrators prefer Zoom. Some are saying, “I really like Zoom, because I could be in my home, and I didn't have to host someone. I don’t have to worry if they were comfortable, I didn't have to be in their home.”

What did you learn about how community-led archives handle highly sensitive topics?

Caswell: There are so many practices of care that are built into the entire process of creating an oral history at TAVP and SAADA. TAVP is very careful to make sure that nobody divulges sensitive information that could incriminate themselves. After somebody tells their story, there are still several steps along the way for them to give consent. The transcript is given back to them, they’re allowed to edit the transcript. They're allowed to edit the actual video footage. They're allowed to decide that they don't want anything to be made public right away, [and] they’re allowed to change their mind later. 

SAADA runs the Archival Creators Fellowship, in which people from minoritized communities within South Asian American communities document their own communities. This has led to oral histories with queer and trans South Asian Americans, formerly incarcerated South Asian Americans, undocumented South Asian Americans, and Afghan Americans. With SAADA, people also talked about how cathartic it was personally to tell their story, and that it enabled them to reflect on how their own experiences have been shaped by their culture and their identity in ways that they didn't realize before. 

One of the people we interviewed [was] a South Asian American emergency physician, and she told her story as part of a project about South Asian American health care workers during COVID. She's a Muslim, and said the interview gave her a chance a chance to reflect about how her South Asian culture, her identity, her religion…  impacted how [and] why she treats patients. Before the interview, she had always seen those things as like a burden to overcome, rather than the very reason she cares for her patients in this way. It gave her this opportunity to step back and see how her own personal story was part of a larger cultural narrative. 

What is the value of this research for the archival field going forward?

This research is pushing back on dominant Western archival concepts, [which were] really developed in the context of bureaucratic records like government records and corporate records. A lot of theories developed in those contexts just don't work for community archives, particularly for minoritized communities. From a dominant Western archival perspective, for example, the creator of a record is only supposed to be creating a record because they want to fulfill a business function. They’re writing a letter to someone or entering something in a logbook or in a spreadsheet because they're fulfilling a business function without any sense that that record  could winding up in an archives used by someone else. 

For both TAVP and SAADA’s communities, people talked about how it didn't even matter in some cases if anybody ever listened to the oral history that they were recording, because it was important for them to tell their story. TAVP [in particular] works with a lot of formally incarcerated people. The official records that exist are prison records or police records that are dehumanizing and that aren't telling their full story. 

To be able to tell their story themselves, on their own terms, and have that story be recorded and put in an archive … is very emotionally important for them. People used words like “cleansing” or “healing” to talk about the process of telling their story. That’s a very different narrative of what records are and why they're created, than [what] dominant Western archival theory poses.

The work is important in a number of ways. First, to support these community archives and their practices, and to give some language to these practices so that community archives can go to funders and say, “Look, this is how important we are. We've changed people's lives. We’ve allowed them to create records that are cleansing and healing for them, particularly those who have suffered from trauma. We've given them archival autonomy.” That is a major impact right there.

What are the benefits to the archivist, the interviewee, and eventually, to the public that can share in viewing these records?

When you listen to these oral histories, you really get a sense of individual stories. To take the time to sit and really listen to someone's story…  [is] a rare luxury. We're often doing a million things at once. To just sit with someone's story for a while is an amazing gift.

Part of the same research project focuses on the importance of peer-to-peer oral history projects, and how important it is that the TAVP and SAADA match people who are peers with each other. TAVP trains people who are formerly incarcerated to interview other people who are formerly incarcerated or people who are system-impacted in other ways, like [those] who have spouses in prison, for example. It’s the same with SAADA - a queer South Asian American person interviewing another queer South Asian American person, for example. That trust and rapport can be almost automatic, even among people who [don’t know] each other. There’s a shared identity, a shared positionality, a shared experience, that is crucial for getting a detailed oral history. Our research really asserts the importance of minortized communities interviewing each other, telling their own stories, and having autonomy to archive and make accessible their own records on their own terms. If my research can support the autonomy of community archives, I have done my job as a scholar.