Towards Collaborative and Care-full Memory Work

A conversation with Dr. Michelle Caswell and Dr. Jennifer Douglas.

The Critical Archival Praxis (CAP) Conversation Series aims to put critical archival scholars and practitioners in conversation around shared concerns, approaches, projects and sites. CAP takes seriously the formative role of praxis in the archival endeavour and works to surface varied and generative approaches to archival world building.

Join us for our spring-term conversation Towards Collaborative and Care-full Memory Work: A Conversation with Dr. Michelle Caswell and Dr. Jennifer Douglas moderated by Dr. Claire Battershill.

Dr. Michelle Caswell (she/her), serves as the Executive Vice Chancellor/ Provost’s Special Advisor on Community-Engaged Scholarship at UCLA. She is also a Professor in the Department of Information Studies where so co-directs the UCLA Community Archives Lab (https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/). In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saada.org), an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.

Dr. Jennifer Douglas (she/her) is an Associate Professor at the UBC iSchool, where she teaches classes on archival arrangement and description, personal and community archives. The overarching question that motivates her research is: What are the roles of recordkeeping and archive making in the intimate and emotional lives of individuals and communities, and what are archivists’ responsibilities to support, represent and make space for these roles? Her research, which has been supported by a Hampton New Faculty Award (2017-19), SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2018-20), and a SSHRC Insight Grant (2020-23) focuses on how individuals and communities use records in processes of grief and bereavement, on the intimate relationships between records and their creators, and on how a better understanding of the emotional and affective roles of records in peoples’ lives might contribute to more person-centred and care-oriented archival theory and praxis. She also co-lead the Community Archival Collections and Heritage Exhibitions (CACHE) Research Cluster, convened by the Centre for Asian Canadian Research (ACRE) and lead the UBC Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS) team, an initiative that is funded by the Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge Program.

The CAP conversation series is sponsored by the Faculty of Information and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and spans three conversations over the 2025-2026 academic year. This is our final conversation for 2025-2026.

Logistics:

The speaker series will take place in the Fisher Library's Hunter Maclean Room located at 120 St. George St. Toronto ON. Barrier free access to the Fisher space is available through Robarts Library.

This event is in-person and registration is required, however, a livestream option is available for those who would like to watch the conversation remotely. The livestream link is available here: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/88901739970

You do not need to register to participate in the livestream.

Please direct all inquiries to: jessica.lapp@utoronto.ca.