The study of Casswell et al. (2016) aims to empirically evaluate the impact of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in the community of South American Asian Americans in academia.
In their review of literature, the authors identify gaps in research of the social impact of community archives in four domains: symbolic annihilation, affect in archives, community archives and archival impact. The authors point out that in each of these domains little work has empirically evaluated experiences of communities or individuals actively engaged in archiving.
The concept of symbolic annihilation describes “how marginalized groups are misrepresented or absent in a variety of symbolic contexts, from media to museums to tours of historic sites'' (p. 58). The authors bring up examples of scholarly works exploring this concept, such as works of Klein & Shiffman (2009) who analyzed the content of a sample of cartoons and found that media had systematically annihilated certain social groups, such as women, racial minorities, the elderly and LGBT. The authors pointed out that mass media ``systematically dispense with imagery and messages associated with these types of persons and, in the process, send a symbolic message to viewers/readers about the societal value of the persons comprising that group” (Klein & Shiffman, 2009, cited in Casswell et al., 2016).
Casswell et al. (2016) argue that community archives can act as “powerful forces against annihilation.” The authors explain that “silences” or “absences” in historical archives can serve as “potentially productive spaces in which communities can collectively imagine records that do not actually exist, but … have affective resonance” (p. 60). The authors emphasize that, despite the rich theoretical scholarship, there is a limited empirical work that used real cases to explain the processes of “accrual” and the impact of “silences” (p. 60).
The authors describe affect as “the noncognitive, nonlinguistic, and nonrational forces that undergird thought, action, and relationships” (p. 60), such as feelings and emotions. Despite significant interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with affect in archiving, a new direction of inquiry is dedicated to conceptualization of affect in praxis. Research that explores affect and archiving is most useful in such areas as human rights and trauma, but few studies have used empirical methods to investigate the impact of affect in archiving.
The authors explain that definitions of what constitutes community archives are broad and include different types of projects. In the US, community archives usually serve as a platform for underrepresented or marginalized groups to make decisions about the content and structure of their narratives. The authors conclude that, despite ongoing research of community archives, our knowledge about their impact on individuals and communities is largely limited.
The authors describe the measurements used in the literature to assess archival impact, such as those used in the Brophy’s model developed to assess the impact of information services on individuals or groups, or the Archival Metrics project developed as a tool for archivists and librarians to measure the economic impact of archives. The authors also review the research that aims to evaluate the social impact of community archives. They emphasize that archiving is different from museums and libraries since the archiving serves not only as a source of information but also as “evidence of actions taken” (p. 63). The authors stress the social roles of archives as platforms for preservation of identity, culture and historical heritage of communities.
The authors describe four themes generated through data analysis: 1) absence or difficulty of accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA, 2) the personal affective impact of discovering SAADA for the first time, 3) the affective impact of SAADA on responders’ South Asian American Students, 4) and the ability of SAADA both to reflect the diversity within the South Asian American community and to promote feelings of inclusion within the ethnic community and the larger society (p. 67).
To describe the impact of the SAADA on participants and the studied community, researchers developed a concept of “representational belonging” which serves as a “counterweight to symbolic annihilation and describes the affective responses community members have to see their communities represented in complexity and nuance” (p. 75).
Reference:
Klein, H., & Shiffman, K. S. (2009). Underrepresentation and symbolic annihilation of socially disenfranchised groups (“out groups”) in animated cartoons. The Howard Journal of Communications, 20(1), 55-72.
The authors argued that we need to rethink traditional modes of academic knowledge production and dissemination. They review the linear models through which knowledge dissemination happens in formats like academic journals. In these formats, scholars send the finished products of their work through closed-door peer review processes, where revisions that happen are not transparent to readers and revisions based on public feedback is very limited. The authors delineate several formats- from pre-print repositories, blogs to social networks, as ways to make knowledge production more dynamic. Dynamic publishing according to them is geared towards making the process of knowledge creation open or transparent, continuously able to revise and edit content, and open to multiple authorial contributions (among other goals).
Centering encounter as the main focus of the article, the authors examine how encounter is the very means by which categories such as transnational capitalism, space/place, and human-nonhuman relations emerge and exist. In this article, the term encounter refers to “everyday engagements across difference.” Ethnographies of encounter, then, focus on the cross-cultural, relational, and uneven dynamics of these processes and exchanges. Encounter is a way of thinking about the ways the “cultural” is made and remade everyday, moving away from earlier conceptualizations of culture as static and bounded. Ultimately, encounters highlight “how meanings, identities, objects, and subjectivities emerge through unequal relationships involving people and things that may at first glance be understood as distinct” (364). Similar to the work PECE does, and to what we’re doing in our VtP collaboration, the authors in this text argue encounter is a way of thinking through a shared set of questions that across different fields and even subdisciplines (365). This is similar to how we are attempting to theorize space/place, toxicity, etc.
The article is an overview of the shift from "conventional" modes of print publishing characterised by closed-door peer-review process, limited revisions of published work, restricted modes of collaborative authorship towards a more "dynamic" publication workflow and system afforded by digital platforms and tools that allow revisiting of what it means to write and to publish. The article raises questions we should think about when we make these shifts. What does it mean to write academically when the audience is potentially limitless and digital tools could allow comments from beyond academia? How does the text and the logics of collaborating transform when new tools afford archiving revisions and comments by peers and beyond? The article also provides themes to think with while making these shifts: how would quality be assured? what would quality mean? how does it transform the "linear" mode of scientific knowledge production and how would humanities and social science scholarship in particular be affected? how would authors revise and edit texts together and would revisions count as "original" scholarship?
To begin, Avery Gordon proclaims “that life is complicated may seems a banal expression to the obvious, but it is nonetheless, a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). It is these complications, especially those that are seemingly invisible, that Gordon explores in her book titled “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.” These complications are, of course, met with contradictions. For Gordon, however, it is these very frictions and tensions that are cause for analytical importance. This book is not only about methodology, but perhaps more importantly, about epistemology: How do we know things? How do we render absences present? How do we listen for silence? How do we wait for ghosts? And most importantly, how do we make “the fictional, the theoretical, and the factual speak to one another” (26)? I’d even argue Gordon’s book prompts us to ask: what are some ways we may rethink the fictional, the theoretical, and the factual?
Of course, the title “Ghostly Matters,” refers to specters and hauntings. It may conjure imaginaries of horror, trauma, fright. Or it may conjure an imaginary of the immaterial. This, however, is precisely what Gordon is writing against. Haunting, for Gordon, is not immaterial. In fact, it is an entirely new form of materialism (69). Haunting gives us access to the present. For Gordon, reckoning with ghosts “is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the past, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” (183). It gives us new possibilities—possibilities we never knew we had. Haunting gives us traces of the past. Traces of absence. It allows us to track history’s imperfect erasures (146).
McKittrick powerfully critiques traditional (white, patriarchal) and naturalized geographic knowledge, building off Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic to site/cite a different sense of place for black identities: as part, but not completely, of material and imaginative configurations of geography. Equipped with Sylvia Wynter’s notion of “demonic grounds,” she asserts black women’s historical-contextual locations within geographic organizations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, McKittrick does not seek to “discover” black women on the margins, but to address the unrepresentability of black femininity and ways black women contribute to a re-presentation of human geography. Poetics of landscape lends a critique the boundaries of transatlantic slavery, rewrites national narratives, respatializes feminism, and develops new pathways across traditional geographic arrangements, reconceptualizing space/place to discover more humanely workable geographies. Examining the interplay between geographies of domination and black women’s geographies in Canada, the U.S., and the Caribbean, she critiques the spatial project of domination that organizes social difference, implicating black subjects through crude racial-sexual hierarchies. To contend with unjust categorizations, she pushes for ethical human-geographic formulations that subaltern communities advance via a grammar of liberation.
In contrast to traditional printed journals that are closely bound to the medium of paper, static and lacking the ability to be revised over time, the authors seek to depict the potentials of Dynamic Publication Formats and to analyze the necessary prerequisites needed to implement them. The authors argue that dynamic publication formats will enable bodies of text, graphics, and rich media to be changed quickly and easily while still being available to a wide audience.
That place is a promising concept for future studies of late modernity in the United States.
Much as a reckoning with ghosts, Avery Gordon’s analysis of social science as a field and its knowledge production is at once painful, unsettling, and difficult; however, as she insists throughout, we need not be frightened of the ghosts we (social scientists) so painstakingly strive to discipline and in its worst forms, stifle. Her project is one that seeks out justice in a world that is not yet “post” modern, whether in psychoanalysis, Marxism, sociology, the U.S., or Argentina, areas where the focus on the “exceptional” and individualized trauma tend to cast social hauntings and complex personhood to the shadows. She pushes for haunting as a methodology—imputed with a kind of objectivity and sociality—that makes the fictional, theoretical, and factual speak to one another. She strives to fill in the gaps of knowledge production through an interdisciplinary approach that examines literature as sociological texts, incorporates historical and photographic evidence of ghosts, and utilizes Raymond Williams’ notion of the structure of feeling. Similarly to Cedric Robinson in his book An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon critiques Marxism and psychoanalysis: while both provided important directions for analyzing unseen forces, they failed to account for the things and people who were primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of social graciousness, whether due to hypervisibility or silencing through exclusion. She introduces Luisa Valenzuela and Toni Morrison as exemplary writers who utilize haunting to recognize the need to deal with the State, Power, Slavery, Racism, Capitalism Science, and Patriarchy, as well as the necessity of reckoning with the structure of feeling of haunting, whether one feels it or not, whether one was on the receiving end of violence, the one dealing the blows, or a bystander.
Methods of historical geography can provide a means of thinking about toxic places as sites of intertemporal relations shaped by historically specific political decisions as well as long-term, dynamic patterns of land use.
“In brief, we argue that local urban change is driven by three fundamental processes: industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment. Industrial churning refers to ongoing temporal and spatial changes in a city’s active hazardous manufacturing facilities as those facilities go in and out of business or move from one location to another. Over time, these movements in time and space generate aggregate patterns of current and former industrial land uses that are specific to each city, for example, clustering along a river that cuts through a downtown or spreading more diffusely toward a city’s outskirts, or both. By tracing these patterns over time and focusing on sectors known to release hazardous wastes to local lands, we can learn a lot about how, when, and where industrial practices are successively transforming urban environments.
“Residential churning is similar to industrial churning, except it refers to human groups rather than industrial facilities….
“Risk containment refers to the tendency of government agencies to selectively manage risks associated with these lingering, or relic, industrial wastes in ways that are politically expedient….
“Bringing these three processes together in Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Portland allows us to watch them unfold over time and to see how they entwine and scale up spatially to produce cumulatively significant changes in local environments. Our contention is that for decades, the unprecedented changes wrought by the gradual but ongoing contamination of urban lands by industrial hazardous waste is but one manifestation of a more general process of urban-ecological transformation we call socioenvironmental succession.” (6-7)