Social Media and the Black Travel Community: From Autonomous Space to Liberated Space

This paper reports on findings from an ongoing study of identity-based social media communities that subvert the architecture of internet and other digital tools to evolve autonomous (“safe”) spaces into liberated spaces. The community in question endeavors to provide safe spaces for information and resource sharing. Two compelling trends were found. The first involves entrepreneurship as a feature of liberated spaces. The second involves secret, or “underground” communication hidden in open spaces as a liberatory practice. As part of discussing these trends, the author introduces the idea of liberated spaces and argues for their importance within discussions of the sociocultural aspects of inclusive digital interfaces and digital cultures

Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice

Archives as memory institutions have a collective mandate to document and preserve a national cultural heritage. Recently, American archives and archivists have come under fire for pervasive homogeneity - for privileging, preserving, and reproducing a history that is predominantly white and further silencing the voices and histories of marginalized peoples and communities. This paper argues that as such, archives participate in a continuing amnesty that prevents transitional and restorative justice for black Americans in the United States. Using the history of lynching in America as a backdrop, this article explores the records and counter-narratives archives need to embrace in order to support truth and reconciliation processes for black Americans in the age of #ArchivesForBlackLives

Restaging the Record: The Role of Contemporary Archives in Safeguarding and Preserving Performance as Intangible Cultural Heritage

Bounded by and framed within the question of the role of contemporary archives in preserving expressions of intangible cultural heritage, this dissertation examines the existing ways performed and event-based cultural heritage are fixed and represented; problematizes prevailing notions of information as evidence in archives; and disrupts issues of archival custody. The dissertation offers new ways of thinking about the points where archives and intangible cultural heritage intersect; as such, the project analyzes these intersections by examining three differing modes of performance-based archivy. With an eye toward existing archival theory and practice as well as an understanding of “the archive” grounded in performance studies, this dissertation uses three unique case studies to analyze and interrogate the perceived disconnect between “the archive and the repertoire,” as well as to expand the body of research on the preservation of event-based cultural heritage. The cases selected for this study, representative of the digital humanities, local practice and international policy, are: the Live Performance Simulation System’s Virtual Vaudeville prototype; the Katherine Dunham Archives and the Dunham Technique; and the implementation of the United Nations Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. These cases collectively interrogate boundaries between archive and repertoire, illuminating the existing ways contemporary archives document, safeguard and preserve event-based cultural heritage. At the same time, each individual case investigates instances of event-based archivy, highlighting necessary shifts in archival theory and practice to better support the preservation of performative means of cultural expression

A Holistic Approach for Inclusive Librarianship: Decentering Whiteness in Our Profession

This paper traces the published literature on whiteness in libraries, identifying major themes in that literature, and then highlights the importance of decentering whiteness for moving the information professions forward. Engaging a dialogic ethnographic methodology, this paper was borne of conversations between librarians of color who worked in the same predominantly white library. The salient themes from those dialogues were the many ways that adherence to whiteness in libraries has had deleterious affective and career implications for librarians of color. The authors argue that to decenter whiteness in libraries and other information centers, it is crucial to center the experiences and well-being of librarians of color; diversify the ranks of librarians through bold initiatives, significantly increasing the numbers of librarians of color; and make large-scale incisive structural change at organizational levels. The paper concludes with an invitation for all information professionals to participate in inclusiveness initiatives by moving from microaggressions to microaffections

Black Lives Still Matter for LIS: An Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction highlights the articles in the special issue Library and Information Studies and the Mattering of Black Lives