radical-empathy

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A note from our editors

Hi there, Radical Empathy friends! We have been on hiatus in posting on this platform due to current Tumblr policies. However we have not yet migrated to another platform due to other priorities. That is all.

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A few choice words and some incredible resources from our own Giordana Mecagni about how to do meaningful community engagement in libraries and archives. This post features a few our our favorite things: a bibliography, citations, a quote from Octavia Butler, reference to our patron saint adrienne maree brown (author of Emergent Strategy), and a mini-zine!

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On Capacity and Care by Bethany Nowviskie, 2015

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Berry, Dorothy, Kelly Bolding, Annie Tang, and Rachel E. Winston. “Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description of Marginalized Histories.” Papers presented at the SAA annual meeting, Washington, D.C., August 16, 2018, 

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This bibliography is a list of resources illustrating radical empathy in archives, created by Jasmine Jones and Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez for their webinar on Applying Radical Empathy Framework in Archival Practice.

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Radical Empathy Makes Me SO HAPPY

Hi friends, 

I don’t usually write personal posts as curator of this blog, but I am so full of overwhelming pride and joy inspired by the most unlikely source: a webinar. Not just any webinar-- this was the webinar on radical empathy in archival practice lead by two wonderful archivists, Jasmine and Elvia, and hosted by the Society of California Archivists. I’m going to share a few highlights and resources from their slides over the next few days, but first, some feelings. 

Elvia and Jasmine are two members of the cohort of nine archivists who started  on our radical empathy journey in the summer of 2017. In preparation for our first talk together, none of us knew that our group would continue the conversation with each other and with our greater community of colleagues over time and space. We didn’t know that several of us would be launched into new jobs at new institutions; that we would find strength from each other in weathering traumas, both major and minor; that we would start new projects and create new scholarship. 

This blog is one piece of evidence of our collective and individual work to transform our reactions to and conversations about a scholarly article into an inspirational platform for building relationships and sharing a vocabulary for things we knew but didn’t know how to express. Thank you, Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, for sparking this journey, and congratulations to Jasmine and Elvia for creating a meaningful and educational program to share this work more widely. 

--Kelly

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Applying Radical Empathy Framework in Archival Practice: the Webinar!

On September 17, 2018, the Society of California Archivists will be offering a webinar that addresses the question, How can archivists apply the framework of radical empathy to everyday practice? This webinar will guide discussion on the application of a feminist ethics of care to archival praxis. The speakers will examine the four proposed affective relationships Caswell and Cifor identify in their 2016 article: archivist to record creators, subjects, users, and communities, and will include a fifth, that of the archivist to the archivist.

It all started with a panel of 9 archivists interested in talking about radical empathy in archival practice at the 2017 Society of American Archivists annual meeting after being inspired by the 2016 article by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor. In the article “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives" (Archivaria), Caswell and Cifor in which define radical empathy as "a willingness to be affected, to be shaped by another's experience, without blurring the lines between the self and the other." The authors identify archivists as caregivers whose responsibilities are not primarily bound to records but to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through "a web of mutual affective responsibility."

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Celeste Brewer cites Caswell and Cifor’s article on radical empathy in writing about her decisions about describing an archival collection documenting the lives of Ben Duncan and Dick Chapman. (Archival Outlook, May/June 2018)

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Via @prisonculture​ on Twitter: “It goes slowly. that's OK. it's slow work. You push. You move. Forward. It's OK. You do what you can. You do what is within your capacity. The important thing is to act. consistently. over time. with others.”

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This piece by Ruth Kitchin Tillman looks at librarianship more broadly, however the section “The Ways We Treat Each Other” speaks to issues of empathy in our profession.

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This is an excellent reflection on the original article that inspired this tumblr. In particular, the question: “How do ensure that we don’t feel so alone, and how do we make time for the hospitality essential to maintain radical empathy?”

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Giordana Mecagni was interviewed about Radical Empathy in Archives for the New England Archivists Newsletter, and shared the text of the article on her website. We love seeing these ripples out into the community to build the conversation around these concepts. 

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In their 2016 article From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives, Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor define radical empathy as “a willingness to be affected, to be shaped by another’s experience, without blurring the lines between the self and the other.” Incorporating a feminist ethics approach that centers lived experiences that fall out of the “official” archival record, Caswell and Cifor identify archivists as caregivers whose responsibilities are not primarily bound to records but to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through “a web of mutual affective responsibility.”

In a profession that has staunchly held onto myths of its own neutrality, objectivity, and dissociation of the subjective and personal, centering concepts of the body and affect critically engages archives’ and archivists’ complicity in perpetuating inequality. Recent and intersecting conversations in the archival field about feminism, queerness, race, anti-racism, contingent labor practices, peer-mentorship, and decentralizing whiteness in the profession, all relate to the concept of radical empathy in practice.

We invite authors from a variety of career experiences and archival practices (students, early career professionals, and colleagues working in community archives, public libraries, museums, non-profits, corporations, etc.) to contribute to this special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. This issue will provide an extended exploration of “how an archival ethics of care can be enacted in real world environments.” It will explicitly focus on case studies, in particular case studies that engage feminist theory and frameworks, relating to the lived experiences of practicing archivists.

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Vulnerability is not weakness.

Wore my new jacket today.