A la découverte du monde des diaks et des podiatchis

Book ReviewBook Revie

A Foreign Servant of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich: Personal Experience and Collected Knowledge of an Interpreter

Book Revie

Michela. Sguardo-attraverso Взгляд сквозь

ObituaryObituar

Karamzin Returns to France

Review of: Nikolai Karamzin, Lettres d’un voyageur russe. Introduction, translation, notes and commentary by Rodolphe Baudin. Paris, Institut d’Études Slaves, 202

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Entire Volum

These Stories Will (not) Shatter Inside of Me

This artwork centers one main theme: These stories will (not) shatter inside of me. That is the sentence that comes to mind a I think of myself, the narrators who have helped me build my dissertation, the BIPOC queer communities that speak up despite growing danger, the immigrant communities in my beloved city of Chicago who are under constant threat from ICE, and everyone who refuses to ignore genocide. I thought about the Black diaspora and how we share our histories—how this extends past us and into other minoritized cultures, whether defined by race, ability, class, queerness, or the intersection of all these things. We talk. What happens when archivists are trained to look at oral histories as a bonus material rather than as a method on par with paper? If we do not change our archival pedagogy to become more aware and inclusive of the myriad ways that different cultures express their histories, these histories will continue to disappear with the lives that hold them. Stepping outside of academia: if you know, you know. The overlooked have resisted this loss for lifetimes. The backing: The backing cloth of the piece is Tunisian crochet, which I have done out of bulky wool yarn. The backing is two toned, split in half with a sky-gray bottom and black top. I have integrated the two colors in an alternating fashion as they meet, rather than having it be one block sitting on top the other. The stitching is black yarn. The tree:The bottom displays the black silhouette of a leafless tree, stark against the gray sky, its branches expanding upwards, becoming distorted as it reaches the top half. The tree itself is dark colored, a combination of stitching and fabric to emulate the look of a tree against a winter sky. The cloth is from my stash--old t-shirts, scraps, and other things I have kept. The figure:  The branches of the tree distort in the center of the piece, reaching up towards the figure of a person with their arms raised. The person is composed of stitching, silhouetting them against the black background. The branches of the tree reach into the person, turning into lightning that ricochets within them, unable to leave their form. The lightning is composed of silver yarn sewn on top of the figure. The person stretches their arms upward, the lightning in the act of releasing through their arms.  The Defiance: Surrounding the person on printable fabric are cut out pages reading: THESE STORIES WILL (not) SHATTER INSIDE OF ME printed onto printable cloth. The font is the Black Trans Lives Matter font, an opensource font provided by GenderFail Press. The sentence is repeated over and over in different sizes, the fabric cut to frame the figure within.

Symposia influencing LIS curriculum and society

This study examines the impact of Heritage Month symposia hosted by the School of Information at San José State University since 2021 on the library and information science (LIS) curriculum and society and through thematic analysis of transcripts from 21 events, the research team, comprising two LIS faculty and two graduate assistants, identified common themes and differences across various heritage celebrations, including AANHPI, Black/African American, Disability, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, Deaf, and Native American/Alaskan Native communities. The findings highlight the importance of identity, representation, and cultural heritage in LIS, emphasizing the need for proactive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The study underscores the necessity for structural changes within the LIS field to support underrepresented groups and foster a more inclusive profession. This research provides a foundation for future efforts to diversify LIS beyond the classroom and into broader societal contexts

“Just Do the Work”: Social, Restorative, and Reparative Justice at American Academic Archives

The early 2020s have been years of great change across the USA – amid a global pandemic, George Floyd’s murder focused worldwide attention on anti-Black violence, and the subsequent spate of protests marked a shift in institutional acceptability of Black Lives Matter as a strategic priority rather than a “fringe” view. That movement has had direct impacts on the archival field, generating a wealth of talks and other disseminations that aim to shed light on the history of archives as institutions that uphold white supremacy and discuss the opportunities and challenges of conducting justice work. Despite the steady increase of published work on the relationship between justice and archives in the last 15 years, and a more recent explosion of social, reparative, and restorative justice work within archives and by archivists, there have not been in-depth systematic studies of challenges to implementing and engaging in social justice as an archival imperative. This poster shares findings from the author’s dissertation, which examines the role of social, reparative, and restorative justice in academic archives, investigating the gap between published literature and practice through an interview study of archival practitioners at academic institutions that are engaging in justice work, supported by and triangulated with qualitative content analysis of a document corpus sourced from academic archives’ websites related to archival justice. This in-depth study of how these relatively new priorities have been carried out (or not carried out) on the ground provides insights into the myriad of ways archivists are engaging in justice work

The Monumental Challenges of Pastmaking

Pastmaking is a process in which agents exercise power to make or use documents depicting a past that can be given or taken as historical truth. Such documents often possess narrative elements perceived for use in heritage formation, collective remembering, and identity maintenance practices. Pastmaking encompasses the performative creation of historical knowledge, prompting considerable pause about: (1) who gets spoken for in (re-)tellings of prior events, (2) how agents arrive at consensus to determine what is historically known, and (3) how knowledge is lost or gained when historical narratives get (re-)written, a salient issue in light of conceptual developments on epistemicide and epistemic injustice in library and information science (LIS). The research question of this dissertation asks: How are epistemicide and pastmaking related through storytelling? In response, this dissertation undertakes comparative case studies of two commemorative monuments using critical discourse and narrative analysis, abductive content analysis, and document phenomenological insights. They include: (A) Columbus Circle in Syracuse, NY, and (B) The Place of Remembrance at Syracuse University. Following a literature review of storytelling, epistemicide, and pastmaking, Narrative Documentality is introduced as the framework for studying the interplay between narratives and documents. This critical qualitative investigation reveals how commemorative monuments subject to performative agencies of giving and taking–afford or deny experiences of historical narrative through their use in constructing the past. Findings offer three distinct contributions to LIS: (1) a relational model of pastmaking, (2) the assessment of relevance as a performative process, and (3) demonstrating instances of document-dependent truth