Caswell, Michelle, Alda Allina Migoni, Noah Geraci, and Marika Cifor. “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: Community Archives and the Importance of Representation.” Archives and Records 38, no. 1 (2017): 5–26.
Caswell, Migoni, Geraci, and Cifor advance a new framework for recognizing and quantifying the impact of community archives on marginalized communities. They do so by analyzing interviews with administrators and staff across Southern California. These interviews inspired the authors’ tripartite framework: a person from a marginalized community finds themselves represented within the archive (ontological), members of a marginalized community find themselves represented (epistemological), and members of a marginalized community feel they belong in the archive (social). These three concepts combined result in “representational belonging,” in which marginalized persons and communities feel represented by and a part of the archive. On the other hand, symbolic annihilation refers to underrepresentation or misrepresentation of a marginalized community in archives and culture. Community archives’ largest impact, then, is their ability to work against symbolic annihilation through representational belonging.