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Toward a survivor-centered approach to records documenting human rights abuse: lessons from community archives

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Abstract

This article proposes a theoretical framework for managing records documenting human rights abuse based on five key principles learned from community archives discourses: participation, shared stewardship, multiplicity, archival activism, and reflexivity. In shifting the focus of human rights archives to these core community-centric values, this paper proposes a survivor-centered approach to such records and argues that survivors should maintain control over the decision-making processes related to records documenting their abuse.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program which generously funded this research, as well as the participants of the symposium “The Antonym of Forgetting: Global Perspectives on Human Rights Archives,” where a draft of this paper was first presented at the University of California, Los Angeles on 19 October, 2013.

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  1. Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 214 GSEIS, Box 951520, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Michelle Caswell

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  1. Michelle Caswell
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Correspondence to Michelle Caswell.

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Caswell, M. Toward a survivor-centered approach to records documenting human rights abuse: lessons from community archives. Arch Sci 14, 307–322 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9220-6

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