Caswell, Michelle. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Urgent Archives reckons with how pervasive and intertwined oppressive and violent practices are within Western archives. Caswell takes us through four chapters that introduce us to how harmful practices and epistemologies are endemic to archival work, how community archives are responding to and working against harmful practices to make archives representative and restorative, and finally how archives can become liberatory and reparative spaces as well as how archivists can work toward those outcomes. Caswell’s book interrogates archival assumptions, policies, and practices in the hope of finding frameworks that move from longstanding violence and erasure toward the possibilities of community archives and community engagement.