Archiving Home: A Community of Practice
Cost: Free
November 14 @ 10:00 am – 5:00 pm EST
Part showcase. Part workshop, Part happening. Come join us for Archiving Home: A Community of Practice. This culminating event will highlight the work of Archiving Home participants while inviting broader dialogue and engagement with the community and other practitioners. Join us to learn about non-traditional diasporic archival practices, connect with others interested in diasporic memory work, and engage with the emotional, spiritual, and personal side of archiving.
Archiving Home: A Community of Practice is a collaborative initiative between CENTRO, the Dominican Studies Institute, and the Haitian Studies Institute that brought together archivists, cultural workers, and community memory practitioners engaging with diaspora- and ethnic studies-focused archives. Through shared-meals, public workshops, and collective zine-making, Archiving Home participants explored the technical and ethical challenges of working with bilingual materials, sustaining community-centered approaches, and bridging institutional practice with the lived experiences and cultural production of diasporic communities.
Archiving Home: Diasporic Archivists and the Labor of Belonging
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
During this roundtable discussion, archivists from Centro, the Dominican Studies Institute, the Haitian Studies Institute, Hostos College, and the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute will discuss the impetus behind Archiving Home: A Community of Practice as well as their experiences as members of the diasporas they help document and how their personal relationships to community, memory, and belonging shape archival labor. This roundtable will explore how these relationships shape what is collected, preserved, described, and made accessible, as well as the responsibilities and possibilities that emerge when documenting the histories of diasporic communities.
Casa de Memorias: Photo Printing and Collaging with Archives
1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
Join Stephanie Alvarado of Fotos y Recuerdos Archives for photo printing and collaging with archives. Each participant will print family photos to make a memory collage that will be preserved in archival materials. We will discuss strategies for family photo preservation and collective memory making as a form of resistance, processing grief, and a spiritual form of archiving home.
Reimagining Diasporic Archives: A Conversation with Independent and Community Memory Workers
3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
Conceptualized as a project that sought to bring together ethnic studies archivists and librarians from the City University of New York (CUNY) system to discuss the technical and ethical challenges of working with bilingual collections from within the institution, the Archiving Home initiative took on a different shape after hosting community-centered workshops and opening the discussion to other diasporic archivists’/memory workers from within and beyond traditional institutions. The common thread of “affect” that is present throughout the work of diasporic archivists and the objects they steward, especially in regard to preserving different ideas of “home”, soon became the focus of workshops and group reflections. During this roundtable discussion, independent and community archivists will discuss their work to steward diasporic memory, the rewards and challenges of non-traditional approaches, and their own relationship to “home”.