 Good evening, everyone. I'm Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this evening's event in our Library Speaker Series. We're honoured to welcome Harrison and Apple, and I'll say more about them in a few minutes. After Harrison's lecture, they will be joined by my colleague Kate Barbera, Archivist and Oral Historian in the University Archives at Carnegie Mellon. The University Libraries Speaker Series features speakers from a wide range of backgrounds who embody our core values of context, curiosity and access. We aim to deliver experiences that inform delight and enlighten the Carnegie Mellon community, fostering an environment that enriches the university's mission. For communities shaped by ongoing structural oppression and everyday violence, community archives are one of the many tools used to address patterns of misrepresentation that are evident across law, education, arts and culture. Rather than serve as extra repositories, community archives are interpretive projects, where knowledge that has been obscured by the dominant culture can be centred. To better understand these efforts and the kinds of work done by those involved, our University Libraries Speaker Series is honoured to welcome community archivists like Harrison to discuss the methodologies of community archiving and their importance to our shared public consciousness. Harrison will discuss the origins and revised mission of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project as a reflection of the precarious definition of community archives within the broad field of library and archival science. Before we begin the lecture, I would like to acknowledge my colleagues, Andy Prisbilla and Shannon Riff, for coordinating the event, our friends in the Alumni Association for their support, and a particular thanks to Ann Marie Mesko and Angelina Spots for introducing Harrison and their work to us last year. Before we begin, a couple of promotional notes. We are proud to announce the launch next week of our fall 2020 virtual exhibit, curated by Kate, who you'll meet later, Julia Corn and Emily Davis, all of the University Archives. The exhibit, What We Don't Have, confronting the absence of diversity in the University Archives, focuses on the lack of diversity in institutional archives collecting. Well, I didn't find the gaps in our own collections. Please look out for this. I've seen a preview. It's absolutely stunning. It will be on our website next week. And also a promotion for the next event in this lecture series, featuring Bechazelle Maguni of the Black Unicorn Library and Archive Project on Thursday, February the 25th, 2021, at 7pm. Between then now and then I hope you'll have a good holidays and take delight that hopefully the election will be past us. So to this evening's speaker, Harrison Apple, as I mentioned, co-founder of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project. They gained a bachelor's degree in global studies and fine art from Carnegie Mellon in 2013, and served as artist in residence of the Center for the Arts and Society at Carnegie Mellon. They subsequently received a master's degree in gender and women's studies from the University of Arizona, and currently just about at the end of a PhD in the same field also at the University of Arizona. Harrison co-founded with Dr. Tim Hagerty of Dietrich College, the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, which focuses on LGBT nightlife in Pittsburgh from 1960 to 1990. I do hope you enjoy the lecture. I think you're going to have a stunning evening. Harrison, welcome and over to you. Hello everyone. Thank you so much Keith. It's been a pleasure to get to know you and learn so much about what the Carnegie Mellon libraries have been up to, especially since I have left. And I'm just so happy to be in Pittsburgh in any form today. It's very odd to realize that this is my sixth year living in Tucson. And as I head forward finishing my degree this spring, I'm looking forward to opportunities to come back, which is also to say hopefully sometime soon we can all be together in person. Sorry for that. So yes, I am Harrison Apple, co-director of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, which I co-direct with my partner Danny Stuchel and Dr. Tim Hagerty from the Dietrich Scholars Program here at CMU. And first let me say that it is a bizarre and exciting experience to be asked to give a lecture where my undergraduate BHA research cleaning out a nightclub with Lauren Gyshemski transformed into a public history project and has since become my doctoral dissertation. In brief synopsis, my dissertation is a historical analysis of gay and lesbian after-hours social clubs beginning with their historical precedents, the drinking clubs, policed by early 20th century urban reformers, and their continued popularity as a calling card of regional organized crime syndicates. And in my writing, I interweave urban historical literature, critical theories of sexuality, race, and culture with the oral history testimonies and artifacts that I've collected from former members of these after-hours clubs. I do this in order to demonstrate that the club memberships are not merely antecedents to contemporary LGBTQ community forms, rather the memberships demonstrate community to be a historical category formed through the commotion of rapid transformations of urban redevelopment that produced geographic and economic overhauls across the city. And those repeated moments of crisis were primarily being treated from the top down with demolition, economic courting of new industries, selective historic preservation, all of these markers of the subsequent renaissance campaigns. In this story, we find a sort of inner life of urban crisis and redevelopment. The social clubs found exploitable opportunities for protection and to carve space for themselves and sort of doing so in plain sight. They also affected and responded to a broader growing discourse of public and politically active sexual minority communities, both in Pittsburgh and nationwide. They were able to do so while benefiting from structures of everyday corruption that ultimately made them dispensable to the changing landscape of Pittsburgh, especially as we consider the collective interest shifting due to the AIDS epidemic, public health crises, and neoliberal cultural backlash. They became an institution that is now ambivalently remembered. I think of them as being held at an arm's length while so many of us are now rediscovering queer histories or searching for them for the first time. And for that reason, I've been very careful as a scholar and as a community member and as a friend to my narrators to show my deepest respect for what people choose to tell me about their lives. And especially as a concern this sort of bygone club era. So for those who have taken time out of their lives to make me part of theirs and to teach me about these clubs and their afterlives, including to the point of ending my own expectations for what makes academic worth legible and valuable. I just want to say thank you again. Through disciplinary research spanning oral history, archival science, and cultural theory develops a unique provocation that we are not entitled to a queer past. That's the title of this lecture, which comes from something that was said to me just two years ago. When I was presenting at the LGBTQ archives, libraries, museums and special collections conference in Berlin at the House de Corteur and developed. I finished discussing how as oral historians, we intervene in the lives of people who we expect to help us fill our notebooks with otherwise unavailable information. And I was considering how do we respond and change course when they pointedly refuse or so a seat of doubt about our research questions. So during the Q&A about coming to terms with this refusal and participating in memory recording and what does that have to do with community archiving. I was planning to not archive a set of diaries that I had been given by someone because they were given to me personally rather than as an archival deposit and making them part of public information and a public information environment would seem to be a betrayal of that trust. Afterwards, a friend of mine who works at an institutional LGBTQ archives came up to me to say hello, and also I can't wait for you to die so that I can get my hands on all the things that you won't show us. So that presented a new route for me to take, you know, I had always been cautious when describing the differences between community and institutional archives projects, because the reality seemed to be that we actually have much more in common than we do differences in our methods of stewardship. And I've occasionally found myself on the community archives panel at random conferences with other archivists who work for major corporations also describing their work as community archiving. Community itself is an unfixed referent applied loosely with abandon. Most community archives also are expected to eventually be absorbed into an institutional repository in order to survive, a point that I think has been very well recently documented by Rebecca Sheffield and her gay and lesbian community archives ethnography documenting rebellions. And there's something very odd that happens when a community archive attempts to describe doing something that will ultimately withhold information from a more universal population of hypothetical users who are primarily scholars if we're being realistic. And that odd thing is the story that I just told you in the attempt to uphold the value of a community archives and archivist to defend a local relationship trust. The response is, I can't wait for you to die, because I know that you will eventually and that trust will die with you. Our proximity to community knowledge, including not just information, but styles and customs of how information is shared is considered highly valuable, but only if we can then be expected to be absorbed into a greater collection base. It reminded me that it is extremely uncommon to find an established archive that is able or willing to expend resources on community collections that they do not then absorb into their custody. And so I came back around to my dissertation work. This talk actually serves as a version of its conclusion to demonstrate how a deep investigation and interpretation of records from the social clubs had inspired me to refuse the imperative to archive everything I can get my hands on on and translate the provocation that archives themselves are not predisposed to democratizing social power or sharing authority with their subjects. Further, to attempt to share work that does not always promise to pay us back. I've written my dissertation a historical analysis of these after hours clubs to make the political life of their membership legible as a historically situated form of queer mutual aid that has undergone molecular transformation during recurring urban redevelopment campaigns. The concurrent globalization of the nation's economy and a conservative cultural backlash. This particular vein of the club era ended in 1988. When the protest response to a violent raid on travelers social club failed to save its membership from the threat of future police violence and increased hostility from the newly formed bureau of liquor control enforcement. Nearly 40 years after the end of this club era, the political life of membership had become eligible. Insofar as the club's continuous history spanned multiple charters and locations and its official documentation obfuscated the membership sexual racial and geographic fluidity. Membership was eligible insofar as it had become a relic of the queer past publicly tried as a corrupt institution from a closet by gone era. And membership was eligible insofar as its own practices of media making, including photographs, videos, mix tapes and paper ephemera had stopped production and stopped circulating staying hidden in the home collections of its aging former staff who are now trying to maintain their livelihoods and homes under ongoing gentrification, a spreading wealth gap and a novel public health emergency. In my varied approaches to tell these stories, I've used the oral histories I recorded with travelers club Stuart Robert Lucky Johns, along with over 12,000 images that he had given to me before he passed away to pull together a more coherent documentary archival collection that attested to memory of the clubs as indicative of a queer social organization entrenched in this regional culture and transformed by its shifting surroundings. The layers of obfuscation and complexity that shroud a continuous narrative of membership, both defined the experience of membership and its archival afterlife. Membership is a specific and important term because unlike most bars and nightclubs these clubs operated on a private membership model that recorded information about each member and required them sometimes to show credentials at the door. It took me years to track down Lucky and his employees, and when I did I found to my very naive surprise that they were not living in a cruel time capsule waiting to resurface. The membership had been annihilated and people had moved on, even the remaining charter for clubs that he had owned like the House of Tilden under new management now in downtown Pittsburgh. There's no resemblance to the conditions of membership in its former lives. What was left of physical evidence resembled a polished surface that I was tempted to see my own reflection in. In my early years of research I took a very forensic approach to constructing an archive of the club community that I could hold close and share with others. I sought out every scrap of physical evidence of membership I could find under the presumption that its memory was something that I and others were owed as part of our history. It was much easier to find detailed features about bars, coffee houses, direct action groups, political collectives and service organizations, but the social clubs were intentionally obscure. However, my experience stewarding Lucky's club collection has since fundamentally changed my position regarding the promise of institutional and community archives to be a form of address that could redistribute political and cultural power. Further, that Lucky shared his own collection of material with me at all was not something I was entitled to as an interested researcher. It may have been my fantasy once, an archival imagination of a missing record returning from the void to its rightful inheritors, but instead I've come to realize that he gave them to me because we had developed a relationship based in an understanding that the materials alone are not a history of the clubs. I was obligated to listen for the way he and others told a history of their own memory, often in conflict with each other. The way they described the pain of having outlived a community that they were once defined by, and the feeling of irretrievable loss conjured when I would ask them to recount those memories. In this sense, Lucky gave these materials to me because he couldn't bear to look at them anymore, and I have since become the reluctant community archivist. When I first learned that he still had some of these slides from the old clubs, I pestered him over and over to watch them with me. But the few times that he looked at them with me, it was clearly under protest. He'd say, honey, I don't watch it because sitting down you ask me, it's him, dead, him, dead, him, dead. On one hand, the AIDS epidemic, homophobic cultural backlash, and the police violence that closed his clubs for good are traumatic stories to retell and reaffirm. Likewise, and contrary to my initial assumptions, the actual processes of arrangement, description, and endless repetition were not empowering for Lucky. In fact, the material's most authoritative caretaker would rather they were gone. And I was surprised to learn that Lucky wanted to destroy the traces of the Traveler's Club, and that he told me that he had actually tried. Once when he wiped the records and locked the doors on their last New Year's Eve party, and again when he burned some of the original slides. On reflection, I think that living without the records protected his belief that the club's ending was unjustified, rather than part of some inevitable flow towards the present. But the records just kept coming back to him ironically as gifts from his oldest friends. I call them digital born-against because their periodic transfer to VHS, which was so popular in the 1980s, made them unpredictably reproductive. The last time they came back to him, they were a Christmas package, 40 DVDs packed with low-resolution slideshows ripped from hundreds of tapes. Their reproducibility was a repetition of that trauma, and while that was obvious from his reaction, it has taken me time, really until now, to recognize this as mournful as opposed to melancholic. The distinction being that mourning and melancholia represent two different reactions to the loss of a love object, something we have given so much of our lives to that living without it entails losing ourselves as we know it. Where mourning was developed in Freudian analysis to describe the slow, painful, and importantly, conscious acceptance that what was lost is gone, melancholia is a neurosis in which we refuse to accept that loss, often sublimating as a kind of hatred for oneself. In this way, Lucky and his slides remind me to revisit Jacques Derrida's thesis on the archival unconscious from Archive Fever. The process of archivization, he argues, is a death-driven destruction of memory. The archive, simultaneously the location of record storage and the authority from which it operates, always works against itself. It consigns memory into an external information object that we steward through an archival afterlife. This is to say, archives have a melancholic and destructive tendency rather than a rehabilitative one, contrary to extending the life of its subjects, it infinitely rehearses their last words. Derrida's maldeachive, translated as Archive Fever, is likewise a melancholic response to the archives, perhaps better understood as madness. It's an unconscious neurotic attachment to the trace of the thing that is no longer there, pleading with its ghosts to answer you from beyond the grave. And when all it is really capable of is repetition, like listening to a saved voicemail, waiting for it to suddenly speak new sentences. I've described my earliest interest in the archive of membership as forensic in the sense that I believed that archives could speak to me from the past, developing into an ironic compulsion to repeatedly view and study the materials, hoping that they would somehow become more real. Rather than accept the absence of what they represented, which was integral to the information environment in which I had been introduced to them, I'd begun by trying to reanimate them. The images ripped from those DVDs were like cinders that I was trying to piece back together into a coherent object. Meanwhile, in interviews I conducted with Lucky, he demonstrated that he had put that fire out a long time ago, and I was, he was not interested in rekindling it himself. In reference to these pictures and the videos that Lucky has given me, my partner once told me that he gave you a wound. It was a burden on him to have them around. It is a burden on me to take them on, to care for a memory that is not mine and be responsible for a wound that is not mine. Nonetheless, the archives profession upholds a core value that community records be shepherded into an archives as part of our political responsibility to expand representation of society at large. And I've found that the choice to not archive them is under theorized as a meaningful response. When I attempt to consider that choice publicly, specifically in relation to the few diaries, the response from the profession was, I can't wait for you to die so I can get my hands on the stuff that you won't show us. And this is the banal contradiction of archives. It just said the quiet part out loud. Producing the archives, including the effort to preserve community knowledge is driven by enforcing information's precarity. I might rephrase, I can't wait for you to die as your refusal is meaningless if we can count on getting it later. Though the archives field is fraught with vocational awe and a desire to see our work as socially empowering and inherently good, I believe we are at best, it seems, benevolent eulogizers. Until put in this position to defend a decision to withhold something from being absorbed into the networked archival landscape of increasingly digitalized community collections, I had not recognized this irresolvable friction between the archives claimed to empower through acquisition and the archival imperative to expand by any means necessary. But as I pause to reflect, I recognize that it's ubiquitous, especially for community collecting projects that put a premium on the archival closet, those items that don't normally see the light of day. In response to their being hidden, we instead describe them as missing, a sort of fidelity insurance placed on the trace of marginal populations that pays out even if they should fail to become cooperative contributors. I'm reminded of Franklin Robinson Jr.'s article on the archival closet in which he recounted how he was able to convince donors to contribute personal materials to the Smithsonian's LGBTQ collecting projects that they had been reluctant at first to give. He described them as self-selecting what they had thought he wanted as an archivist. And while I'm not immune to the morbid pleasure that comes from paging through the personal effects of the dead, I've been putting my own sense of our goal entitlement in perspective. I wonder at which point are we archivists unable to distinguish between an indirect refusal and willing participation. Reflecting on this tension, I do not believe that community archiving is a self-definite form of community care. I'm well versed in the reparative language of representational democracy and the rehabilitation from symbolic annihilation that is popular in celebration of community archives when they work. But when confronted with someone's desire to refuse the imperative to archive, we are trained to side with the archive, not the person. And I know that I share in that archival rescue complex that is so much a part of the discourse of community archives. Rebecca Sheffield tells a story in Documenting Rebellions, which I had mentioned a bit earlier. There was a conference at the archives, formerly known as the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, in which a black study scholar who was skeptical of the project of queer archives crumbled up his speech notes. That is to say that if the archives wanted them, they would have to take them in this form, balled up and never to be opened. And she describes giving in to that desire to put them in an acid-free container, marked do not unfold, which it seems since is more of a dare than an instruction. Choosing otherwise is a difficult decision to explain, but a productive place from which to reassess what I and so many others wish from an archive and what they actually produce. In the past, I have rushed to rehabilitate, reorganize and re-exhibit Lucky's dark archive for the exhibition Lucky After Dark. But the layers of commercially, excuse me, the layers of complexity that seem to come out of that deceptively simple question, what does it mean to be a club member, continue to push against the decision to make his collection public. In retrospect, part of my work ever since has been dedicated to creating as comprehensive of a finding aid as I could for a collection that was never supposed to see the light of day and that I had pushed to reveal. As I continue to navigate how to carry on the task of stewarding Lucky's materials, I decided to keep that phrase, I can't wait for you to die, as a provocation of what community archiving might be about, rather than a progressive container for the imagined backlog of subjugated knowledge waiting to be made available to the rest of us. And this question about the mark of a community archives, a reluctancy to broaden collections and increase access is what I continue to work through as part of our broader Pittsburgh queer history project mission. It began as an art practice actually here at Carnegie Mellon School of Art, excavating and exhibiting the detritus of 6119 Penn Avenue, and after hours clubroom in East Liberty, leased by Lauren Gieshemski of the Vienna Music Festival. That space had hosted over 60 years of different memberships, and the artifacts became part of the I'm feeling lucky group exhibit at the Miller Gallery, now the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. The art practice of exhibiting the refuse pulled up from under the carpets and plywood mutated mutated into an independent oral history project in which I sought to fill out the sparse archive of information. The oral history research led to lucky and the eponymous exhibit of his photographs that was supported by our co-director Tim Hagerty and the Dietrich Scholars Program, as well as the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Center for Arts and Society. By the end of the exhibit I had become somewhat of a self appointed community archivist, and I was convinced that the value of filling out the archive was self evident. I had staked my interest on the academic tumult and archival science from the 1970s and 80s, and the promise of interventions to the narrow lens of records acquisition. Reflecting slivers of the contributions from feminists and new social history scholars, archives criticism of that age seemed to promise broader archival collecting as a slow remedy to the historical process of political disempowerment. I had social erasure and existential suffering. Howard Zinn's case to humanize and inevitably political craft challenged archivists, especially government archivists, to refuse their training to think of themselves as neutral guardians of institutional and government interests. That archives had too long served the privilege of the privacy to the most powerful as well as steering collecting nor toward their legacies. Gerald Hamm likewise pushed contemporaries to direct their eyes to the edge of archival collections and dive in. The mission of the contemporary archivist was to take an ethnographic and scholastic approach toward active acquisition and appraisal, such that their collections hold up a mirror to society. Finally, credited with creation of the documentation strategy, Helen Willis Samuels asked the self-reflexed question of the field that still echoes today, who controls the past. Archival institutions that thought of themselves as self-contained and monolithic agencies, she argued needed to embrace a collaborative strategy to link seemingly unrelated records to one another across collecting institutions to create an even more robust and complete record of its subjects. Importantly, counter cultural influence on these archives inspired some professionals to redirect their collecting efforts to better represent the general public. However, these calls to re-engage archival work as socially conscious and justice oriented were not necessarily critical of the archives ability to pull that off. These scholars whose work continues to be celebrated for their critical approaches to archives as dynamic and selective institutions. Likewise, we're demonstrating a broader investment in archival collecting as the necessary fuel for social and political practice. Having identified the community archives as my own project's future, I had aligned our definition of a community archives with contemporary ethnographic research that claimed it was the very act of collecting which ultimately defines a community archives. In effect, lending the status of the title of archive more broadly, rather than attempting to narrowly define a community species of the archive. There are still criticisms from archives professionals who are resistant to lending the designation of archives too widely. To some, it represents a dilution of professional archivist tradition for others a failure to understand archival science as the true and singular origin story of the field. But such critiques cannot deny that community archives emerge to fulfill something otherwise unavailable on mainstream institutions. Andrew Flynn and Mary Stevens have argued that most if not all community archives are motivated by the failures of mainstream heritage organizations to collect, preserve and make accessible collections and histories that properly reflect and accurately represent the stories of all of society. This more complete archival imaginary is a logical outgrowth of that late postmodern turn in archival studies to combat social inequality by representing the whole of society, all the while maintaining the profession's proprietary expertise as the authority under which community archives are permitted to operate. So notwithstanding the celebration of the community archives, the relationship of the institutional archive to the community archives is to continuously pull information resources from the margins to the center. In my experience as a community archivist, this is represented by the recurring offer to be lent expertise but ever financial resources to maintain collections we have taken on stemming from the presumption that institutional acquisition is the future of community archives. This misunderstanding about the relations between institutional and community archives is a problem for making their distinction meaningful and it's a site of recurring contentious intervention from community members themselves. As an example, I'm reminded of the scene in Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film Watermelon Woman, where the lead character also named Cheryl in search of information about a little known black lesbian film actress, known as the Watermelon Woman, visits Klitt, the center for lesbian information and technology. And is punished for attempting to make copies of materials for her own research. When she enters the archives, her visit is guided by MJ, a volunteer archivist played by Sarah Shulman, who speaks in repeating tag lines like welcome sister, we are an all volunteer of uncollective. The reading room environment mirrors a typical library and archive setting underfunded but standing, limiting access to materials one box at a time, monitoring Cheryl's activity at a close distance. Finally, MJ screams at Cheryl for attempting to shoot video photographs, and it's made clear to the audience that at Klitt, no amount of closeness between the archive and the community precludes professional methods for refusing intervention by the community itself. At the close of the scene, Cheryl placates MJ's anger until she leaves the frame and continuing to hold up photos to the camera she says to her camera woman, get it Annie, get it all. And then the truth telling caricature questions is the community archives as we know it is a technology designed to counter the restrictive function of archives and collecting or simply occupy that same position of power. I think that community archivists myself included often start the description of their work with the false premise that we as individuals and the archives are one in the same. The amount of labor it takes to create and maintain collections easily fosters a possessive relationship. While composing these questions about the violence of archives and my participation in this practice. I'm also quick to recall my experiences with those people who have readily volunteered to contribute testimony and artifacts. I think of Lucky's home healthcare AJ saying to me as we first met. Oh, thank God someone finally came to hear these stories and the subsequent years of interviews and object donations from bar owners employees performers and patrons. This primary scene of community archiving that I recall is about gratitude and collaborative acquisition. But since that slip. I can't wait for you to die. I've tried to resist substituting these selected experiences for evidence of what community archives are. Joan Scott's evidence of experience argues that experience is not the origin of our explanation. It is not evidence in that sense, rather experience is that which we want to explain. Why must I believe that community archiving is emotionally powerful and a politically empowering technology. In the gratitude scenario I've just described the archivist and the willing participant are a metonym for archival practice. This scene of gratitude really stands in for an entirely different one. Given the robust criticism about the general lack of awareness for the daily drudgery that is archival labor. The scene in which I or others take the place of the archives is a conscious repudiation of something we also know to be true. The work is quite lonely and narcissistic. Especially considering the non-existent budgets allocated to or scrunched up by community archives projects is understandable that the prolonged isolating work fosters a deep personal connection between the archivist and the collections they steward. Consider for a moment the myth of narcissists staring into the reflective representations as if that polished surface of the pond or mirror where its history neatly encapsulated. I think it is easy to treat that possessive relationship to archival material as a closeness to the person it is meant to represent. But as John Berger critically argued and about looking events and subjects have been made so absolutely marginal in the process of representation that no amount of concentration can ever recenter them again. Rather than always concede to the expansive gaze of the archives as the optimum resting place could we instead focus our concentration on the materials own history. Even as it longs for deconstruction, longs to fall apart to unfold before us as part of its own context of creation. I think of Caitlyn De Silva's curated decay as one kindred place of scholarship that attempts to translate decay as a meaningful choice in representation and preservation. I've tried to understand this as a similar move to recognizing and responding accordingly to the refusal to participate in archives. And while a participatory ethos has been advocated by a number of contemporary Community Archives scholars to preclude alienation and refusal, it is also true that few donors wish to spend their precious time reminiscing, especially as it concerns heartbreak loss and personal violence. To insist otherwise is a disavowal of the archives as a historical technology of depersonalization and centralized subject authority. What otherwise do we say to those who have been disappointed by or even feel cheated by the process of appraisal that deselects materials for acquisition? By definition, the archives must create collections by removing them from their living context. And this disavowal refuses the archivist that is ourselves that we are social being shaped by that very technology. In favor of a reverse relationship where a mere change of objects that we collect stands in for a revolutionary change in outcome in which the archives become the thing it destroys through excavation and preservation. A change of collecting interest does not disrupt the archival technology of documentation in order to give power away to the subjects whose representations it collects. Rather, the archives becomes the autonomous arbiter of that representation. Well, its subjects enter into a direct object relationship with the archives potential users. As Anthony Dunbar had argued regarding the obstacles to creating equitable practices between archives and the black communities that they had attempted to create records for or manage records of, the structures of the archival profession maintains a lockstep that holds documenters and documented firmly in their place. So when the political imperative to expand representation collides with an under-examined refusal to comply, I can't wait for you to die as the result. It's a rare moment of clarity that I think was only possible between friends who share an inside look at that particular self-deception but differ in their wiggle room to try something new. So when I think of the meaning of the phrase I can't wait for you to die, I find myself in ironic alignment with one of my least favorite scholars of oral and public history, Daphne Patai, whose contributions to the follow-up editions of women's words harshly criticized feminist and queer oral history practice as delusional in their claim to be socially empowering and justice-oriented. In what she once proclaimed to be playing the laborer and the capitalist, oral history, she wrote, produces more representations of precarious lives as part of academic career building. And in this, she means that oral history makes a dubious claim to solidarity with its participants. Patai's extreme political bias evidenced by her now recurring ultra-conservative editorials about the culture of higher education reveals a parallel suspicion in my work against the equation of increased data collection and the redistribution of power through representation. I can't wait for you to die is the expression of a hastening process of community documentation exhibited across institutional and community archiving. It is an expression of archives as a historical technology that first and foremost seeks to grow to the size of its container and assert an overarching subject authority. It cannot help it nor can the archivist continue to operate without them, continue to operate them without this reality, unless of course we are willing to actually abandon it altogether. My unexpected affinity for Patai's polemic suggests that success in actually making archival and academic work empowering and redistributive might be completely unrecognizable in terms of scholastic productivity and archival professionalization. So I have since tried to describe my position that of refusing to always archive or else hurry up and die as a pessimist archival practice. And here I'm referencing pessimism as part of a philosophical pessimism described by Joshua Fouadienstag as a non-system building philosophy or a way of life that is the twin of modernity's more prominent optimism. Rather than describing a despondent psychological disorder or a theory of imminent social decline pessimism he argued defends a denial of inevitable progress. And in terms of archives as part of a society I mean to say that rather than hold out hope or place insurance on a bigger archive to redress injustice and erasure I am interested in understanding how archives may be inherently productive of their own absences, which is to say that ruin is something archives are actually quite good at producing. So by pessimist archival practice I mean to say an opposing view to the archival optimism that was born of the promise to reproduce democracy the representation in the archives. Fouadienstag's most recent investigation of a political theory of representation and film and politics similarly takes a critical look at the relationship between representation and empowerment, where he writes of optimism that it takes many forms both cinematic and political, but as a shorthand we can think of the easy equation of representation and empowerment that is often made when considering both Congress and Hollywood. However, the pleasure received in the feeling of power or freedom provided by the experience of mimesis, the look of something like ourselves and positions of authority does not necessarily produce the condition of empowerment or further democratize power over history. Nor is that failure the fault of an imperfect mimesis in the form of film, a political representative, or in my own exploration fond of records. As a concerns claiming a history we feel we are owed but had previously lost community archives provide the replayable trace an illusion of interaction with the past. It is a solution that is relatively risk free compared to the actual conditions of being together in community, including with those who would not have us. I have to be able to choose unproductivity as a result of being in those relationships that make knowledge sharing intergenerationally possible in the first place. Even if that is ironically a relationship with a queer elder who actively refuses to produce endless records for my cause. Rather than hope to correct someone's refusal to give him a desire to replace the recalcitrant subject with an information object or malleable that I can know how to manage. I am asking myself about my impulse to wait around for someone to die and for something else to be left behind in their place. As an expression, I can't wait for you to die is a promise to not intervene in your present suffering because the record you will leave behind has been made all the more valuable by your precarity. And precarity is what seems to bring value to the community record, even to the point of imagining an archivist hastening the process that will allow them access. So since Lucky's passing, instead of precarity, I focused on possible on desire as the basis of my research relationships. Where I had begun my work in a forensic frenzy to reconstruct the past through acquiring scraps of memorabilia, I later realized that what I was more likely to be asked for was to help people maintain the collections they already had going on. I turned away from the acquisition and exhibition format towards what we've been calling preservation in place, teaching people to use their home computers, access public technology, setting updates to look for them in slideshows, make copies of materials for loved ones, even digitizing home pornography collections so they can be replayed and enjoyed over and over again. And these activities, as well as introducing new friendships and reconnecting long lost ones, are where I frequently and unproductively turn from the archives. I consider this to be support for collecting that is already going on and has not asked to be rescued by the profession. I put my energy into keeping it ongoing because it has become clear that the effective stewardship of the long lives of records is not always promised by central custodianship. As Joel Whirl argued in his 2005 article, Ethnicity as Providence, there is room to be critical of the custodial roots of archives. He wrote that the foundational function of archives was to secure the property rights to records for a repository. These were the terms of agreement to preserve records as history. He explains that our work may be to understand our methods of preserving history as incongruent with facilitating memory. Community records are already part of dynamic social systems that not only have records, but make meaning out of them through their idiosyncratic use and obstacles to universal access. Where the contemporary North American archival ethos imagines custodianship as the defining principle of archives, Whirl, now 15 years ago, advocated for a shift towards stewardship, characterized by a long hauled association between repositories and communities of origin. Departing from the totalizing mentality of custodial collecting, stewardship recognizes the misleading futility of referring to a repository's holdings as anything more than a limited selection of potentially useful resources. So I'm thankful to him as well as the queer ethnographers and oral historians whose writing has helped me to reflect on listening for what people want, especially as their wants conflict with my expectations for interview encounters and archival acquisition discussions. Those listening now who were able to join me earlier on September 24th, when I spoke to the University of Pittsburgh about oral history and queer oral history, might recall Horacio Roque Ramirez's haunting contribution to bodies of evidence in which he grieves for his friend and narrator, Alberto Navarres, aka Teresita La Campesina. This story clarified for me that their relationship and the ones I have developed in my own work are in fact the method of stewardship. Stewardship in the sense more closely resembles a risky and erotic relationship than a sterile conservatorship. And while I have been inspired by world's plea to the North American archival profession and Horacio's grief for the end of the kind of work he could only do with Teresita, my point today is to land on this shared authority over preservation as one of mutual pleasure, that like my relationship can and should be able to be revoked. This is how I understand Lucky and I's relationship as it concerns archiving and slides from his clubs. I believe that while an archivist and an archivist who so closely identifies as it genuinely wishes to preserve that representation, I can't wait for you to die, is the unexpected but logical response from the profession to anyone who denies the archivist's entitlement. And I don't mean to dismiss the value of custodial archiving out of hand, which is often what I fear may be fantasized as a response to this presentation. I've never actually said that. I, too, take on physical collections. What I'm saying is that there is an illusion about archives that the situation should help us to disabuse ourselves of. The illusion that custodianship is an indispensable feature of preservation and memory work, and that refusing that archival imperative to expand is a morbid corruption that must be stamped out by archival authority. In other words, I'm trying to continue archiving while aware that neither the profession nor the technology is actually pointed toward empowerment and justice and leaving room for the possibility to refuse. I would hazard a guess that if there is such a thing coming as an inherently liberatory archives, we would do better to expect the unexpected. That such a liberatory apparatus may bear no resemblance to archives as we know them and as we operate them. Something we would be forced even to say is not an archives, which is where I've been accused of going for some time. Last week, I summed up a similar discussion to this regarding oral history as a long-haul friendship. And similarly, archival stewardship, reframed as a long-haul relationship with queer elders, is something we have to invent, even though counter-intuitive actions might arise. Stewardship arrives to each arrival context, I believe, somewhat undetermined. Whether it's the agreement to withhold something from a future of endless repetition or the promise to Xerox the hell out of your photo albums, stewardship is the sum of everything through which we can give each other pleasure. And that last little holdout between living memory and their custodial future is where I intend to focus. I intend to move slowly as an archivist. That is to say, there are alternate approaches to community archiving, which do not hope for precarity. Can I move slowly because someone's waiting for me to die? Thank you. Thank you, Harrison. That was absolutely wonderful. Hello, everyone. I am Kate Barbera, archivist and oral historian in the University Libraries at CMU. And I'm excited to join Harrison this evening to moderate the Q&A. So if you have questions, please add them to the Q&A box. To start things off, I would like to return to your days at CMU. We're holding this as a virtual event. But if we had been able to gather on campus, what are some favorite CMU locations that you would have visited? Well, you know, I spent a lot of time there. The School of Art, like many programs there, is famous for people losing way too much sleep over things that maybe weren't that important in the first place. And I particularly was fond of that bizarre intersection of Doherty and Ween Hall that begins at, I believe, level five and subbasement C. And they come together and you have to figure out where you are. So it's not a site in that sense, but it's definitely, it's what comes to mind when I think about CMU and places that I miss. And that sort of impossible architecture that comes with building a university over an abyss, which feels oddly relevant to this talk. So building on that question, what kinds of experiences or courses did you have at CMU or possibly relationships you established there? But you think are valuable to your work with the Pittsburgh Queer History Project? So there is one I actually bring up all the time, which is that when I was in my penultimate here there, I was a student illustrator on an archeological site in San Bartolo Guatemala, where we were doing, I was asked to do scientific illustrations of these very large sides of buildings called mascarón that were buried deep underground. Anyway, there was a site that established it and the director, the co-director at the time was asked by either the Peabody Museum or some other institution when they would be expected to move some of that material to their repository. And he said, totally, when you find a situation that has preserved this as well for 2000 years, if you can name that institution, I'd be happy to send it there until then it's not moving. And that comes up more often than I would have ever expected in terms of community archiving and queer history. It's difficult to resist what we learn in professionalization, but you cannot assume that you always know something that the public doesn't know when it concerns documentation that's supposed to somehow become more representational. And it can be a really uncomfortable thing to know, like you don't know how to care for this object. And that's usually only, I think in our field, you know, us both being archivists, recognized in terms of racial sovereignty, as tentatively as it's described in the field when it concerns Native American Indigenous First Nations archives, is sort of the only place in which the field is ready to say, yes, clearly, that's fine. But outside of that, getting someone to agree to just not take something because they don't want to give it to you and they don't believe you understand it is a hard sell. So you talked a little bit about the difference between community archives and institutional archives. And I'm wondering, do you feel the same critique applies to institutional archives and why? Well, let's think through that question, right? So the first part is there is a difference between institutional and community archives. And I actually think that the answer to that is, or if I may ask, is that, is there such a thing as a difference? The answer is sometimes. Because so many community archives, which I think consensus argues, is just anything that calls itself a community archives. It's not strong enough of a claim to refute. You know, it's sort of based on self naming practices. So that's fine. But does the same critique apply? I think absolutely, as it concerns things like, are we overly zealous to collect materials that we may not be the best stewards of? And do we actually have stop gaps to faithfully consider that and consider not taking something as an option? And I think that looks different in an institutional repository because your scope is very different in a community archives. I think the trouble is that community is such a broad term. You know, Miranda Joseph wrote a book called Against the Romance of Community, and in it she starts off with this sort of 50 line that's very useful, which is that anybody can call themselves a community, whether it's the Republican evangelical right claiming to be the real America, or if it's even they're like opposing at the time, maybe she's writing about Clinton Democratic platform. Each of them claims to be the real underlying population of this political agent. And I think as it concerns things like communities defined by racial demographics, communities defined by sexuality, we run into a lot of counterintuitive things where on one hand we know that race and sexuality and gender are historical concepts. They are not the same over time. As it concerns archiving, we are interested in a centralized kind of arboreal approach to find umbrella terms and call them rubrics or to find umbrella terms and say like this is imperfect, but it's all we've got. Meanwhile, we have really excellent critiques within the field as well that taxonomy in subject description and taxonomy in record arrangement has a very real effect, even if it's not something that's explicitly written out. So I think that this critique can apply. And I think I'm not interested in giving a master theory for archives. We're full of master theories. This sort of emerged out of a glitch. And I really wanted to hold that that problem close and think about what could happen if you really dedicate yourself to it and think like I'm going to break through this little hole in what an archives is supposed to be and then what it's doing. And I think this is as close to as I've come to getting on the other side of it. So we're getting a few questions from the audience. And they would like to hear your thoughts on the role of community led archives in preserving access to records that powerful institutions may later want to conceal. So for example, accountability in archives. Yes. All right, so this is an interesting question because it's also very, very specific right. This is a kind of event that I would love to see, but so very rarely occurs, especially in the US we've never had truth and reconciliation committees to become arbiters of state violence and war crimes. You know, George Bush was never tried for massive war crimes. And we think about state violence happening right now and the frequent inability for a mass of data to keep police unions from protecting killer cops. I think that these are interesting examples of where community led archives can be important in preserving a reaction to those materials and preserving community dialogue, but I don't think it's the site of preservation. I think that that gives a little bit too much credence to the records themselves. That's not where necessarily archival or where activism is translated. Although there are places in which that is the central goal of the interference archive of Brooklyn was a great example. But again, you're dealing with the sort of beautiful and sometimes ugly aesthetic cast offs and objects of activism. It's not the whole thing. And it reminds me also that in archival science. I think when I've elsewhere presented the idea that we are perhaps a bit too invested in the archives ability to do good by us that the the quick responses to think about the most extreme example, a sort of human rights violation. But if we're going to continue to work through archives that can span the gamut of accountability for the government something like Vern Harris is working in South Africa after the after the post apartheid government and with the same rigor describing a community archives that's just about one bar community with the same authority. Then this problem is is firmly situated in it. It can't be sort of swept away by one thing being more recognizably a crisis on the other. But likewise it brings into account like what is what I'm really talking about here is how incomprehensible it is in the field to imagine someone refusing to become part of an archives. And likewise, the decision to destroy their materials rather than donate them. I've known some people who have chosen to do this I've described some people who have chosen to do this. And I think it is our responsibility as people who call ourselves archivists and who want to be a part of the field and perhaps change it in any way to take, you know, take those events as meaningful. If you can talk a little bit about how your work as an oral historian has influenced your critique because as a fellow oral historian, if somebody tells me during an interview, I will give you this information, but I would like you to turn off the recorder. That's a request I always honor. So I'm wondering if that that kind of situation influenced your critique. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the talk that I referenced at University of Pittsburgh, I think of as a sort of prequel to this lecture. It's based on a version of the talk, a very small version of that talk that I've written that hurts the reaction can't wait for you to die. And in it I was trying to understand like what is queer about queer oral history and it was about building that relationship between yourself and a narrator that it's not something you are entitled to and can be taken as a given you often have to make it up with each other because you don't necessarily have the same sort of normative relationships for talking across differences of age or other kinds of structural difference, especially as it concerns relationships in what you're talking about each other's bodies in the interview. And likewise, oral history sort of has a trouble with this idea of sharing authority right sharing authority under Michael first was about that sort of momentary ability to share authority over the interpretation of what is history. As during the interview, but after the interview it's very troubled you know it's sort of temporary the processes of editing, transcribing and editing and publishing are very much within the documentary role and they are very much dictated by the the demands of the academic industry which I think Daphne Battaye actually points to and I still can't believe that she is the person that I always point to for this but such it is. And I ended that talk with a discussion of how learning to listen for when somebody was done being interviewed or never cared to be interviewed in the first place but still wanted to make demands on you. I thought that that relationship we build as young queers and queer elders was one place where you can listen for what people want and think about that as something better than getting the interview, maybe getting the interview is actually in the way. And in a similar sense that has informed my idea about an archives that you can perhaps steward material and in invest in a more rich record. If you are not so completely committed to taking on the materials yourself or demanding it. So how can non archivists participate in stewardship and encourage communities to do so, both in times of precarity and when they're thriving. How can non archivists. I mean, so stewardship as I was describing it is a pretty big term. The Joel world's description of stewardship was about facilitating memory and it comes out of a potentially violent event that he describes at the beginning, I believe he's a sort of a Chicano history archives held at maybe UCLA. I'm glad to have the article right in front of me to get the exact location, but he's saying that during the LA riots that people were getting ready to burn down the archives, which is such a fantasy, I would, you know, it's just like, you never hear about that. So just just kidding archives are burned all the time natural disaster or otherwise. And what he tried, somebody at that archives tries to explain to the people outside that they would be burning their own history that they would be destroying their own record. So he became sort of a the scene for him to think about stewardship. He said the problem of course right was that the repository didn't actually have a relationship with the people that claim to be representing such that the idea that these records belong to them was not only not clear didn't make any sense. And some of the detail he puts into that article is about changing the way that custodianship works. And one hand, he says that it's about building a long call relationship and that is important but he's also not really talking about moving the records out of the archives right. He's interested in the arrangement and description reflecting the ongoing reality of that community that it's supposed to represent. And it's sort of that's I think where that's where the argument sort of stops. And I think part of that is because archival science publication are particularly dedicated to technical solutions. The role of theory takes a lot of, you know, time in in education and in PhD programs but it's a little bit less common in the journals themselves. And there kind of needs to be that article with the paragraph at the bottom that says here's how we did it and you can too. So when it comes to non community members helping steward I think it can look like things you don't expect it can look like paying for somebody's rent it can look for look like helping somebody at the library doesn't use a scanner. And the idea of encouraging people to hold on to the materials presumes that they either don't understand them to be valuable, or have no means of producing them and are unwilling to ask for help. So those are totally different problems. If someone is unwilling to ask for help, and you are somehow already in a relationship with this person have that conversation. And if somebody is in precarity, and you know how to keep their things from being thrown on the street which is a big part of queer archives histories dumpster diving, then make that person to person support real. You know, we can't count on an archive to swoop in. As any archivist knows right there's only so many of you at any one institution and frequently there's only one. So what it concerns a community archives your your luck is even slimmer and I think that the role of non archivist is important. What constitutes authoritative community knowledge right. So is there a connection between the materiality of certain kinds of records, and the non archiving or resistance to capture that you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I think that there are materials that we desperately wish to capture and have a very troubling time attempting to do it, like collecting bodily fluids collecting decaying organic matter, in general, which is actually most of what archives are with the exception of occasional synthetic properties that end up in there. But I think that there's not necessarily an instructive relationship. Like I can tell you, this particular material make up suggests that you should be willing to let something die. Although that is an interesting way to think about it and I am curious about what to do with it, you know VHS wants to die. And I'm often ready to let it, because the amount of energy and resources that are destructive to the planet must be gone into the air and air conditioning to keep tapes at a particular consistent temperature, they must be redubbed over and over again to keep them in circulation because the the mylar tape and the magnetic coding are constantly pulling away from each other. So I, you know, I'd be pressed to say there isn't the materiality that doesn't call for letting something fall apart. But it's what we do when it can only consider what is falling apart mean. Is it possible to let something fall apart because we're not interested in the original object is the most authoritative representation is a bad copy better than a good original. For many things I would say yes I consider myself a bad copy. Often when I say, when I try to make arguments about archives, and I just say something that someone does not like they are quick to remind me that I am not a real archivist, because I didn't have certification or because I am, you know, in a gender women's studies program not information or because of the community archivist and I don't know the great of working in NERA. You know, and it doesn't happen all the time but it happens enough to remember that we are not only gatekeepers to the public we are gatekeepers to each other. So questions about letting something go come down to very personal decisions about how we think of what we do as deeply connected to who we are. You know, the discussion of Cheryl Dunye and I had another example that I pulled because there's a, there's a tricky fact that I'm not sure I could totally defend, but you have to imagine in those situations where somebody says I am as a part as the representation that's in this archive in the wrong place and pulling it out and taking it. You know, the archivist must feel wrong, they must feel hurt that somebody has attempted to take the records away from them that the records can move without their consent without their authority. And that's very much a part of the, of what goes what's charged in this question of letting something go or, you know, letting go of the sense that we need to have it. Can you share more about the relationship of archival projects and community futures. How do your community archival methods inform your approach to teaching and your own artistic practice. Thank you. That is awesome. A couple of ways that this comes into mind for me. So as an educator, I am interested in designing courses that are really interested in media production as well as media preservation. I think the two need to go hand in hand. So, you know, as a graduate student, you don't get to pick the courses you get to teach, but you do get to pick how you teach them, at least at our institution, which is quite lovely. I'm teaching digital storytelling and culture and surveillance special topics and currently information multimedia and the moving image. And in between tutorials on Photoshop and Premiere Pro and Audacity, I'm able to assign and discuss works about theory of representation as well as archival science to get people to think about the growing lives of the material that they create and whether or not you can even trace them, you know, is it possible to trace something that's going to have so many digital copies that the origin point for it is beyond looking for. There's no point to it. Likewise, in those discussions because of my training in the gender women's studies department. I like to put those conversations in context of, you know, critiques of, of history critiques of power imbalance, and to think critically about what is it that we want out of politics and what we get out of the processes that we use you know do we must we do everything in order to build up a political platform is there not something that can be thought about because the thinking itself is important. The thinking itself is worth the time, or maybe worth is the wrong word there keep trying to value things. And here I've been talking about turning away and doing things that are unproductive. That's that's where a lot of that comes but in the project itself, you know, we do have an online archives where we save some things because of the relationships we've had with donors that includes a request to make them shareable. You know, and that's not everybody that's not every item. So what you see on the online archives is not the full holdings. It doesn't represent the breadth of the work it also doesn't recommend represent the breadth of the archival scope. I think because so much of what I do collect has been under the sort of the rubric of collecting oral histories for my independent research, and working with people to think about where they want that recording to go if they want it to go anywhere. I've also done interviews where people have asked them to not be recorded period so instead we sort of sign a document that says, we talked. And I trust this person to maybe repeat a couple of those things, but it's not going to be written. And, and so I think that as a as a community archives project that doesn't exist under an institution that has to then demonstrate what it does in line so specifically with the desires of that institution what they want as outcome for whatever reason. We get to play with what archival output looks like and the last one that we did that I actually have a an agreement with the Cornell libraries to help do a second version of it in a different form was this sort of penny saver newspaper. And we realized that a lot of people we know, especially career elders either don't have access to the internet period, or the only accesses on their phone. Or they simply don't enjoy navigating websites, you know you can work through user design forever but it's going to consistently change. And a lot of people feel confounded by Facebook let alone omega, you know as a records exhibition site interface. So this thing that looks like, you know, a familiar newsprint object which is also what it's designed to be, and includes little essays about how the HS works and what we've probably feel about it includes sort of objects that we've redesigned or reframed. We have this sort of q amp a from the Miss Pittsburgh 1992 pageant which I think is wonderful because you're realizing that a lot of these contestants are being asked about, you know, upcoming Senate bills about who should be tried in a trial about a computer that includes someone who had gay pornography in their apartment. And then my, the thing I might be most proud of is this sort of blockbuster catalog of items that you can hover a phone over a QR code and it will bring you directly to that linked object, where we have over celllessly described a lot of nightclub tapes that we've received from the eagle from Pegasus, and they're described in such a way that they're linked to time codes that tell you when people are on stage and it's not just about the reformists about the activists who are speaking about events coming up it's about the people who tip. It's about the people who make up that scene of an audience and a performer and the people working there, and sometimes bits of footage that were supposed to be recorded which are quite fun. My art practice is built on this idea that perhaps archives could operate. Otherwise, it's a really old critique right that the reading room is sort of designed just like a prison funny enough. And if we want to be able to have our objects move with people I think we have to consider how they move. We're sharing objects. And I'm an archivist so I love to see the things. What was your favorite object you worked with in cataloging the Pittsburgh queer history project. Oh, that's tough. We have a lot of clothing really catchy slogans that are always fun, but it's sort of like obvious fun, I think. And the diaries were chewed on by his dog. So they didn't go in for several reasons but one of them includes these teeth marks that are really lovely. The, the most dealt with the most delicate object let's just choose a relative. It is a small stained glass window that was given to us by the former owner of the eagle that we have not made public because we're considering how to share it or if perhaps it should go into some type of possession. And it is three beautiful tulips that are clearly penises it's just the most camp Pittsburgh objects to have leaded stained glass for a gay bar, a leather bar nonetheless you know have that sort of representation. But likewise I think some of my favorite objects of late in a different vein have been Harriet Stein donated a bunch of pamphlets that she used to carry for the Gertrude Stein political club. And they have her notes, collecting a straw poll of people's voting practices as she's going from bar to bar that election night, and she has little pencil mark scrapping off what she's thinking. It's not terribly legible you can't get a lot of information out of it but it's just it's one of those materials that really feels like you can follow somebody around with it, and it makes you want to do the same. How has your relationship and or feelings changed in relation to the archive as you have advanced in your education. And what was it like on a personal note growing as an archivist while you were growing your archive. Can you repeat the question I somehow missed the first part maybe as long glitch. Absolutely. How has your relationship and or feelings changed in relation to the archive as you as you have advanced in your education. Okay, well I do think that this this talk is sort of a representation of that you know when I came to Tucson, it was the way to keep the project going. Without having to do whatever all my friends are doing which was get a day job at a coffee shop and do your art practice in the evening. So those lovely Google jobs that are floating around for some people and do a lingo if you're listening please, but the. No, it was it was a way to keep the project going so I was really excited to come here and work with people like Jamie Lee Susan Stryker who are both certified archivists, and have worked as archivist in the past Susan used to direct the, the San Francisco GLBT historical archives and so we always got to talk about stuff like that and Jamie Lee here has the Arizona queer archives. And I think because I hadn't been through formal training I was excited to learn about things like DAX I was excited to learn about formal archival arrangement I was excited to learn about the history of debates in the field that weren't the parts that I was reading in the humanities which are like integral to how we think about archives, but tell you a little bit less about why archiving itself can be so rigid. It's useful to learn but I also started to find some major problems with the materials I had collected and the choice was either to say that when I collect or not records and therefore not worthy of my attention, or archival science is not the thing is not the whole thing. So questions of provenance have been really big for me. It's been a place where I've had the chance or really had to. I've had to write about oral history and archives together frequently because one cannot exist without the other as a concerns community records. So provenance is so much easier to do with people who own a lot of property, they're quite ready to explain those relationships in those histories. And North American archival science especially benefits from the history of archival thought that stems back to modern European nationalism and it was very interested in describing agents of the state. So those situations that those standards come from a very clear cut and mine are not and I'm not the only one who experiences that so looking to oral history to help describe how do you, who is the, who is the community of origin for a record that has no maker, or at least one that can't be really deduced. And there are people writing about that in archives as well but they also are frequently looking at oral history or at least ethnography. I've asked you Michelle Caswell or two people that come to mind frequently. And there are many others, of course, but yeah, my relationship to the field has changed in so much as I think that as rich as archival science can be the professional organization of SA a and the, even the, the more, I think, progressive organizations and theory that are interested in archival education and theory are likewise on a different track that I'm finding myself which is that there is a lot of discussion about how to save a collection. And I would like to just see a little bit more about how to consider if archiving is is not sometimes the problem. Eight years or so since you started the archive. What would you have done differently if anything Walked away. It's hard work. It's painful work a lot of people I've gotten to know and love have died, and I would not those relationships wouldn't be as painful to end. If I weren't doing this, but I wouldn't actually walk away I can imagine what I'd be doing otherwise. I think that some things I would do differently. I mean, there's little things we all kick ourselves over. I wish I had better documentation of this object. I wish this technology failed and prevent this thing from disappearing. I wish that person had gotten back to me on my voicemail or I've been more aggressive and calling them because they passed away before a lot of my regrets have to do with death. Before they pass away. So, yeah, I think that it would be not being so precious about whether or not people are willing to hear you out at first. I think I was very nervous about that that first contact with people and Elizabeth Kennedy who has been my mentor here. She wrote Boots of Leather slippers of gold history of a lesbian community in Buffalo focused on sort of butch femme bar communities and 30s and 60s amazing book if you have a bread it. And I was telling her about somebody who I was afraid to contact because she was just such a badass and I was like afraid that she wouldn't want to talk to me. And she just told me you're being way too precious with people and they can handle themselves so call and call and if they tell you to stop calling stop calling, you know. So that was a big that's something that I would change I would tell myself to be not so scared. I in my my dissertation includes a story about the first time I met lucky. I was driving up he lived in Spring Hill at the time, and if you go up I think it's Royal Street in years since I visited because he passed away six years ago. But it's sort of a one way street for two way traffic and I was nearly falling off the edge of the barrier into the ravine by that church. And I was so freaked out that I sat outside of his house for 10 minutes in the car. Before I went up to his door and when I walked in he was very sweet and said like are you gay. And I don't want to talk about gender so I just said yeah, and I looked look over and he has had a security camera just pointed at me the entire time he had been watching me just freak out for a solid time. So I wish I would have been a little bit less scared. Yeah. So since you mentioned, you know you've been giving these wonderful readings throughout your talk and you mentioned one just now. If folks want to learn more about Community Archives practice. Are there any other readings you would recommend. Yeah, sure. I'm something that is a bit dense so it may not be as much fun to read if you're not in school for archives or reading it on your own is controlling the past documenting society institutions essays in honor of how long will it last. I especially like it for her, her essay on retiring at the end and she talks about her intellectual curiosity as, as related to be always being the youngest child at Passover and having to ask the four questions. Why why why and I was often the youngest child at Passover so I think that that story resonates very well but it's also an interesting survey of critical questions in archival science. I would also recommend, I have all of my books up on the walls right now because I've been writing my dissertation so you need to grab quickly. I would recommend, and really our own two cars for the record, because it writes about archival absences and such a way that it's very important and I think missing from archival science. I like people to read Sadia Hartman's wayward lives beautiful experiments, because she's writing about an urban reformer archive of black bottom Philadelphia, how there's tons and tons of documents created about black women in the early 20th century about people who have no idea who they are, and sort of create more records to suggest that they don't really exist or if they do it's in a way that is illegible and not meaningful. So I wanted for thinking about that conflict of does more do more records create more power. You know I think especially in an age of data valence, more records do not create more power they create more opportunities for you to be indexed, and whether or not you have the power to manipulate that data is likely not the case. I think that people should also consider data studies in their archival research because as it concerns digital collections which are so in vogue. We must consider what kinds of information we are putting out there to be concatenated and turned into synthetic forms of knowledge that will impact people's lives, whether or not we think it's even possible because truthfully the way the data is processed is beyond human comprehension, we can't predict it, not ourselves anyway. So wonderful conversation we're going to keep going for a little while longer see if we can get to the rest of these questions. Someone says your talk make me think about the reality fever to collect and archive, which isn't isn't just an impulse or desire but a demands the academic institutions place on researchers, specifically from undergrads to tenured professors and library faculty. Are you able to talk more about that. About the demand from an institution for its employees to be archived. Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a couple of ways you can approach that the most obvious one to me is that the sort of agreed upon origin point for archival practice, not not agreed upon the sense that everyone still uses it but that it's the Bible of archivists in the 50s is the Dutch manual for arrangement and description of records, which, you know, is born out of many traditions that are sort of synthesized, but also specifically from the, you know, the history of record keeping so thinking about other books to read right there's along the archival grain by and Stoller, who says of archives that they are not just near to try this of organic reality but they are dreams of fortunes and futures and nightmares of for being something terrible. It's fabrication that archives do not just reflect reality they construct it for a lot of for the people who control the records themselves right. So, yeah, as it concerns university archiving, you know, let's think about the project that you're working on now with Andy the the what what don't we have what archives don't have. And there's, you gave me the chance to read some of that before this talk and I'm excited to see what's going to happen with that. And it, it's pulling out a lot of different terms like diversity and inclusion and representation. So what does that mean at CMU is sort of the stake of that that project. And we have talked about how our discussion about this lecture before it would happen had kind of, I don't know, pricked your interest about. Are we in fact, because we are the institution that should be expected to be collecting this materials, have we given consideration to the fact those people may not want us to have them, or may not believe we're very, we're good enough to keep them. So yeah, when it concerns university employees it's difficult because sometimes that's actually a legal contract that they get to retain copies of your work that you would have to spend a lot of money that you don't have to fight and may not be worth your time. But yeah, it comes down to record control, you know, records are a resource. They are things that are considered trash or waste products that can then be turned valuable. Right. In so many cases, and I think universities are very good at doing that. So what values exist in rendering defunct physical spaces anew from bringing an archive like Lucky's online. How do we find community through community defined archives. So that is an interesting question. How do we, what was the first part. So what values exist in rendering defunct physical spaces anew from bringing an archive like Lucky's online. So thinking about physical spaces translating that to an online experience. So, I think that there's value in, I mean what values in particular as we're asking right so I think that there's value doesn't really answer the question. Let's see. So one potential value of being able to reconstitute some partial image of those spaces, I should say about nightclub images, they're very dark. I have a lot of detail. I actually have had mostly learned about what clubs look like from people who describe them to me in oral histories. So that would be a big part of it. And that brings in a second question about the legibility of records. So, when we think about reconstituting of place that is no longer here, we have to think about the work that goes into this sort of audience and object relationship. Are they, are we making the opportunity actually there for somebody to listen to an oral history as something beyond just granular bits of evidence that can be taken and reconstituted. I often think of the show a foundation oral history project that was called new directions that the first time I saw I was terrified it was this sort of virtual reality Holocaust survivor game where you ask a question and it reconstitutes an answer from a digitalized transcript. And it was like meat puppet. It was super, super creepy. But of course you got a huge response because it's a very compelling archive to work with and had millions of dollars in funding to build this camera cage to do it. And then you're being you're interviewing this person through a periscope so they can't see each other and that they can't be obstructed because they need to be shot from all sides. So I think that there is value in giving some access to that material and to rethink how Pittsburgh has changed over time. You know I the the times that I come back every year which this year of course has been halted but it's usually three or four times a year maybe one or two and lesser times, and I drive around I remember the first time they built those apartments across a bakery square and put that IBM of a skywalk I didn't know where I was. I didn't know where they were and I was like but we're on Pan Avenue and this is Liberty Boulevard. So it's interesting to think about how we trace the topographical changes. But I do think that there is a limit of what archives can provide there it doesn't reconstitute the space. You have to do that. You have to build relationships with people who you think might not be around anymore. Also as a trans scholar in spaces of memory work I am frequently asked very pointed questions about how certain communities may or may not be preserved if we're not avidly collecting everything they produce. And to that I say we have a lot of archives and it doesn't change how quickly people are being murdered in the street, and it doesn't change how quickly people become irrelevant to their communities. So if you want to preserve a culture you cannot do it with an archives alone you have to do that work outside of it, and the archives may not even be the most important part. We have time for one final question. We're going to wrap things up. So what are the ethical considerations, you have to discuss with narrators who provide things to archives. One more question. It's also like very grounded. It's a thing that you do. So in our process, it looks like usually that I have already been interviewing someone through oral history, because of their interest in in my, they are sort of mutual interest in what a social club is and how it's not easy to define and, you know, kind of process all of these and frequently actually not not frequently infrequently someone says and I happen to have a couple of tapes. And you have to think about who carries documentation right it tends to be people who have had a stable living situation, or at least family that they're still connected to where they can put things when life is hard, or they've been wealthy enough to own their own home, or they own a business and that business is the garbage heap where the archive is currently live. So those are some examples. And with those instances, the oral history interview has turned into a sort of sharing of materials to look at them and discuss them and ask them what how they are made meaningful to them, besides the sort of general housekeeping questions like how do you keep this thing preserved what object is it sizes it. But that usually comes a bit after we'll do like a deed of gift and in that deed of gift, as opposed to just a discussion of transferring property we really focus on the idea of. If you could ask us to do something about these materials for you what would it be usually it's making a copy. We asked people if they are interested in giving up the originals if it's like too difficult for them to hold on to them that we would be willing to do that. So that sometimes happens, but we're not interested in doing that every time. It's just on the case by case basis. And we are interested in in people's sense of privacy about how this material circulates so will it be made digitally available, you know sending someone a DVD, or sending them back a thumb drive is different than putting it on Vimeo unlisted and the password protection. And likewise, we have to consider the way that information circulates about people that they cannot predict. So it also matters, you know that I look at the material sometimes and watch it and think through what could possibly come of somebody else seeing this who knows this person in a different context, or has power over this person in a different context, and then talk with them about my concerns and ask them if they are still interested in our particular setup, which of course if it doesn't mean publicly sharing is a lot easier to do. So the ethical concerns for me are really about circulation and reproduction because that's mostly what people want is they want to share things on Facebook and Instagram and they on Twitter. They are not necessarily as jazzed about the kind of box I'm going to put it in. I remember one time I was collecting some leather material from someone, and they said what are you going to do with it and I was like I'm going to put it as a tissue paper and it's going to be oiled every so number of months and we're going to take it out we're going to hang it on a hanger. It's like no, no, no, no, what are you going to do with it, which is I think lost on a lot of acquisitions discussions like your programming has to be part of this discussion in Community Archives frequently and it can't just be like, we'll get to that that's our prerogative you have given it to us this decision is no longer really yours unless you become a donor. So those are some of the ethical concerns as well as like what does programming look like and what kind of relationship do you want to keep having This has been absolutely fascinating Harrison thank you so much for your time this evening for sharing your research with us. It's been absolutely wonderful there are a few questions that we didn't get to, but thank you so much everybody for joining us tonight. It's been an absolute pleasure.