Abstract
Despite a growing focus on human rights issues within the field of archival studies, education designed to prepare students to be practicing archivists, scholars and educators has rarely considered how best to address these considerations as they relate to the tens of millions of individuals and communities who have experienced or who are descendants of forced diaspora. This paper reflects on the genesis, development, implementation and emergent themes of an experimental transdisciplinary course, Migrating Memories: Diaspora, Archives and Human Rights, designed to address this educational gap in archival education. In addition to relevant scholarly work, the course integrated fiction, creative non-fiction and film in order to exercise issues of memory, documentation and archiving relating to forced diaspora. This enabled the subject to be approached in the spirit of research in contemporary cultural anthropology as well as archival studies that is addressing the human dimensions and dynamics of memory and identity, in particular those that are cultural, affective and generational.
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Notes
In many instances, the term ‘homeland’ does not necessarily refer to or correspond with ‘objective’ points of reference such as a particular country or a modern nation state, but more to a subjective sense of belonging to a particular place, a way of life, and the memories and identities of places and the people who make them.
A few doctoral students had to withdraw because of competing research commitments.
It should be noted that formal processes for granting asylum to refugees in the U.S. were not established until 1980, when the U.S. Refugee Act was passed. Prior to 1980, refugees were either admitted under special programs, or had to go through the regular immigration process. Refugees from Vietnam were admitted under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975, and subsequent acts. Although they did not have to go through the same process that asylum seekers have to go through today in terms of establishing a "well-founded fear" in order to be admitted to the U.S., Lam's account in Perfume Dreams makes abundantly clear that Vietnamese in refugee camps were very likely to be sent back to Vietnam if their "stories" did not hold up to official scrutiny. Nevertheless, the student's father's identity card might carry even more weight in an asylum application today.
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Gilliland, A.J., Halilovich, H. Migrating memories: transdisciplinary pedagogical approaches to teaching about diasporic memory, identity and human rights in archival studies. Arch Sci 17, 79–96 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-016-9265-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-016-9265-9