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Where do we look to find evidential narratives of past communal resistance? How are these stories preserved and shared widely? By people like us (you included) working steadfastly in a variety of ways.
Here, at ESFL – we embrace the values of “slow librarianship” in our mission and commitment to mobilize community knowledge for solidarity, justice, and equity for all.
What is slow librarianship you ask? (Okay, you didn’t ask, but we will tell.) As featured by the American Library Association:
[Lori Spradely] defines Slow Librarianship as “an antiracist, responsive, and values-driven practice that opposes neoliberal value” and highlights how library workers build relationships by interpreting and meeting their patrons’ needs, providing valuable services to their communities. This approach involves “slowing down” internally, and, as Farkas notes, focusing on “learning and reflection, collaboration and solidarity, valuing all kinds of contributions, and supporting staff as whole people.”
In the Community Digital Repository (CDR) for community archives we apply the concept and practice of slow librarianship – to archivalship. (Yes, yes we know, ‘archivalship’ isn’t a real word… or is it?) In Toward Slow Archives (Archival Science, 2019), Christen and Anderson write:
The long arc of collecting is not just rooted in colonial paradigms; it relies on and continually remakes those structures of injustice through the seemingly benign practices and processes of the profession. Our emphasis is on one mode of decolonizing processes that insist on a different temporal framework: the slow archives. Slowing down creates a necessary space for emphasizing how knowledge is produced, circulated, and exchanged through a series of relationships. Slowing down is about focusing differently, listening carefully, and acting ethically. It opens the possibility of seeing the intricate web of relationships formed and forged through attention to collaborative curation processes that do not default to normative structures of attribution, access, or scale.
“What is a repository?” Wordsworth P. Musinguzi (Project Assistant at the CDR) offers the following insight:
A repository is simply a place for things to be centralized and stored. When communities form and design their own repositories, it becomes a site to steward the collective and individual histories of those that these “things” belong to, particularly under-served and under-engaged communities. To me, it is a reservoir to take care of site-specific memories shaped by lived, human experiences and the conditions that establish narratives into the public memory. ESFL’s Community Digital Repository (CDR) provides an entry point for surrounding communities and the public with free, uncensored access to digitized found objects, recordings and documents from their own cultures and communities. The CDR seeks to break down the systemic barriers that wall off communities from their own lives, memories and knowledge, while building a destination for the greater public to engage, contribute and shape the composition of the archive with their own first-person stories and narratives. Stewardship, access and care are the central tenets of the CDR and aim to nurture the livelihoods of communities with a platform that expands the definitions of preservation and shared ownership.
For fascism to attain and retain power- a fascistic monopoly on narratives is a necessity. We experience the reactionary pendulum swing fast and hard – taking aim to knock the gains made towards liberation – out of the ballpark, the arena, the historical record. In times like these, it is our collective storytelling of how forebearers resisted oppression in the past, that functions as a lantern lighting the multitude of paths towards resistance and fueling hope in dark times.