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Critical Directions for Archival Approaches to Social Justice

Ricardo L. Punzalan: assistant professor of archives and digital curation at the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland. His research projects include assessing and documenting the impact of digitized ethnographic collections, understanding the ecology and infrastructure of agricultural data curation, and examining “virtual reunification” as a strategy to provide integrated access to dispersed ethnographic archival images online. His articles have been published in American Archivist, Archives and Manuscripts, Archivaria, and Archival Science. E-mail (corresponding author): [email protected].

Michelle Caswell: assistant professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Caswell is the author of Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia and more than two dozen articles on archives, human rights, and social justice. Caswell edited a special double issue of Archival Science on human rights in 2014. She is also the cofounder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saadigitalarchive.org). E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract

This article explores the rich history of social justice as a concern in archival studies and delineates future lines of inquiry for the field. We begin by examining how social justice has been defined in the archives literature and its implications for archival studies. Next, we draw forth five major strands of archival thinking in relation to social justice. We identify prominent areas in the archival literature that highlight the relationship between archives and social justice. We also identify critical questions in the relationship between social justice and archives and propose new research trajectories that we deem necessary to advance the archival field in general and its scholarship in particular. Finally, we argue for the importance of research that strengthens the tenets of social justice as a central principle in archival scholarship and practice.