 It's Digital Women's Archive North and I'm going to keep quite on script to try to get through all my thoughts really First really excited to be on this panel I think it's got some really interesting content Digital Women's Archive North is an arts and heritage organisation Delivering a programme of community based projects and research relating to gender including culture heritage, spaces, equality, social participation and wellbeing Dwann, na nhw'n gwaith, dylun o'i history bwysig a'r hollwaith ac yn gallu ymgranteiliaeth ddiolchol. Hawn mae'n brif posiwyr ffeministol, o bobl gwisig scheduled ac digital, i ddim o'r bobl gwisig yw Mae'n mynd i'n mynd yma yn gyfnodigwydol, o'i gweithio ffemnigais argyffredig a gyrdd hynfi. Fel wnaeth wedi'r proses ymgyrchu i bach o'r ffraith digital gweithlentl, sy'n cydweithio newid yma ar gyfer cyfrifol arwirio celfwyr ac digital. Oesidenio'r prosiect o gyffredig hwnnw, iawn o'r gyffredig yr Artysgol, yr Ady Carrol Trust y Cysgyrch, oedd y cyfaint honno iawn o hyd y fath i'r cyfriddol, rwyf yn cael ei bod yr archifos, cyfaint, technologi a'r adliadau honno, a phobl iawn i gyfer y cyfreithddiaeth, a'r wneud o gwasanaeth newydd a phobl iawn y cwliadau a'r fanodol i chi oedd ar y cyfaint mewn bwysig. Fod ar gyfer ddechrau a'r fersiwyd gan ddiweddol, oeson yn gweithgwrs yng ngyd-gwil. ... Folks, I have to correlate with what I'm saying. They're just interesting images. A lot of them actually are taken from the Working Class Movement Library and also snippets from... ... Manifesto from Feminist Archiving, which I'll come on to in a minute. I'll just be randomly clicking through stuff. The archives involved in this particular project of building a digital women's archive... ... North include the Corp College Archives, the Working Class Movement Library... ... the Pankhurst Centre, Archives Plus, the Race Relations Centre, Feminist Web's archive, People's History Museum, the RNCM Archive, the Victoria Baths Archive and the Museum of Transport Greater Manchester Archive. Community workshops form a significant part of the research process. We aim to ensure collaborative and co-designing of the archive. We want to explore how women as collectives and individuals can potentially use the archive, how they would like it to function as a digital women's space for collecting and showcasing women's heritage, culture and creativity. How the archive can support women's campaigns and activism. Outputs from the research phase will include a series of co-created prototypes, ascetic, immersive and interactive, we hope. Offering some ideas into how a model of material feminist archiving can offer solutions for digital feminist archiving and feminist organising more widely. Before continuing with the digital discussions, I'd like to take a few steps back to explain how we got to this point, which has really been about developing an underpinning model of feminist archiving which sits within a wider context of feminist activism and organising. The Digital Women's Archive North first developed to address the welfare of women and girls from the perspective of a socially engaged heritage practice responsive to key issues of hidden histories, women's education, violence and abuse and skills development. The aim of DWAN is to create a model of feminist archiving that crosses between both welfare and heritage sectors with the aims to offer inspirational stories and locking examples of radical women doing extraordinary things to support literacy and education via the curatorial processes, offer opportunities for digital skilling and encouraging more women to enter the sector via heritage and archives, enable connectivity, collaboration and communication between and with other women. This year we publish our first draft of a manifesto for feminist archiving or disruption in feminist review. The manifesto is a creative and playful document and reimagines the archival process as we suggest women and men use the outline to begin rethinking their interactions with the archive and their input in for creating a new. It is neither definitive nor exhaustive and should be unpicked and rewoven by its user. The manifesto suggests three particular methodological approaches for feminist archiving. The first is intervention, a process of generating new practices and approaches for intervention with existing archival material. Intervention methods are specifically concerned with access and interpretation. The second method is living, approaches of specifically connecting archive material with contemporary political and activist contexts. The living archive is one played out through the body and particularly concerned with individual engagement and voice. And the third method is the reimagined, a reuse and recycling of the archive material to recreate new archival forms. The reimagined is concerned with creating new processes and archival structures. The manifesto calls for an active relationship with the archive, one that conceptually and physically rethinks best practice for managing and creating collections. The manifesto identifies five possible intervention points through selection, type, facilitation, storage and time and access. Documenting and collecting is a significant part of feminist archiving, but additional processes of rethinking access, interpretation, uses and creation of new structures are facets that will ensure a wider relevance in application. In feminist archiving there are fundamental concepts that demand engagement. The first is the issue of how physical space and content of the archive is negotiated. The second is the issue of how materiality itself, the notion of how we perceive heritage. The manifesto offers a response to space and heritage that is consistent with Dorian Massey's position as a feminist geographer. The materiality and space is relational, active and living. Space and heritage are messy, unfinished processes of stories so far and performative meaning making. The methods of disruption playfully suggested by the manifesto encourage participants to take ownership of archival processes, to take ownership of how content evolves, how space is negotiated, how time is perceived and how heritage is performed. Feminist archiving then can support education, skilling and empowerment of women through ensuring a participatory and creative role in developing what archives and should be. Notably, women and girls' ownership of time, space and content is relevant outside the archival context. It is a process of building self-confidence and self-belief in an ability to shape and participate the socio-political processes that supposedly represent you and structure your everyday experience. Feminist archiving is not an isolated process and should result in evidence change to both infrastructure and wider collaborations. The archivist, if still considered in the singular, becomes a creative facilitator and storyteller rather than a gatekeeper. Participants, traditionally termed users, become empowered as creators of knowledge, not just passive receptors of existing practice. The methodologies that fall under intervention, living and reimagined should facilitate new dialogues and should shape different participatory structures. Feminist archiving then is perhaps logically close to community social and youth work than it is to traditional archival practice. Feminist youth work strategies such as self-organising, collective actions, connectivity, participation, negotiation, the right to autonomy should underpin feminist archiving. Likewise, feminist archiving draws on the processes of socially engaged arts practice such as storytelling and conversation, sharing via action and emancipation. Feminist archiving wishing to impact socially also emerges from collaborative practice between different perspectives and sectors outside the heritage sector and embraces cultural practitioners and charity and public-oriented services. Feminist archiving is a practice for evidencing absent or marginalised histories, production and participation is, of course, not new. Scholars such as Kate Eichhorn in the Archival Turn in Feminism in 2013 and feminist art historian and curator, Emilian Jones, extensively explore this area. Feminist individuals, a collective since the 1960s and 70s, have actively employed feminist archiving along accompanying discourses around rights and equality, in the gaps in history and ensuring that her stories are actively collected or rediscovered. Feminist archiving can be traced back further to collections we now describe to the feminist archival canon, emerging from social context where feminism and women's rights were low on the political agenda. Early examples of feminist archiving include the World Centre for Women's Archives 1935-1940 in New York and the International Archives for the Women's Movement in Amsterdam again 1935-1940. Both were founded to ensure the evidencing of their country's women's movements. Both organisations were established during a period of social, political and economic struggle and heightened militarism, as well as a period marked by a sharp decline in feminist activism. Historically, then, it seems that our turn to feminist archiving is strongest during these moments of struggle when a form of creative feminist activism is required to counter oppression. So, Dwan is interested in the practical application of feminist archiving in supporting social action against injustice and inequality. For Dwan, feminist archiving is a circular process of creating the society we want to be evidenced. Feminist archiving should thus be responsive to the continued challenges faced by girls and women, as highlighted by recent reports by the Children's Society, Plan International, Frida, the Young Feminist Fund and Association for Women's Rights and Development and the UK's own Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy 2016-2020. Plan International states on its global girls campaign website that girls continue to be the single most excluded group in the world. They face discrimination abuse simply for being young and female. Girls and young women are often denied their right to education, to engage actively and equally in society, to take important decisions about their futures and bodies, to injustice and equal opportunities and to protection from gender-based violence. It is noted by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals that ending gender violence, ensuring gender equality, enabling the participation of girls, women in education and political processes is crucial for sustainable economic growth and development. Notably, there are considerable overlaps between the objectives and challenges of feminist archiving and feminist organising more widely. It is in these intersections between theory and practice, heritage and the contemporary that feminist archiving can play a valuable role in generating a set of tools for women and girls. This is where we see the potential for grassroots cyberfeminist digital heritage and archiving as a form of activism, enabling girls and women's creative and cultural resistance and connectivity through data and content curation. For example, as a technology of non-violence, we propose that digital women's archives have the potential to educate, empower and skill women for challenging the threats of violence. Archiving is a process of shaping knowledge and knowledge has the power to transform. By empowering individuals and groups to shape their presence in cultural heritage, women and girls can create a global, visible cultural resistance to the eradication or marginalisation of their stories and experiences. Just one of the many ways girls and women are subjected to violence within oppressive societies. Additionally, cyberfeminist archives can offer educational spaces that offer up women's diverse heritage and histories whilst also enabling new voices and experiences to be evidence and sectors to connect. For example, the recent report from the Children's Society in 2016 demonstrated the increasing need to review pedagogical practice in supporting girls in schools to engage with issues of identity, self-worth and sexual knowledge. According to the report, girls aged 10 to 15 years are becoming increasingly unhappy in the UK, and the education sector needs to look to best practice outside its profession to youth, arts and heritage sectors for new ways to support young people with these complex issues. So to conclude then, feminist archiving, both cyber and material, encourages the archive to live as a relational space of stories so far. Archiving is not a passive inherent process. To that end, feminist archiving can position itself as a model for ensuring future representation is actively shaped through present socio-political action that feeds back into the archive, both conceptually and physically. Likewise, uses of existing archives should respond to the activists called to develop creative methods for challenging inequality and discrimination. Building on the initial ambitions of the first international archives for the women's movement by Rosa Mannis in Amsterdam, 1935, digital technologies offer potential for a cyber feminist archive to empower groups to connect, collaborate and communicate across geographical boundaries and barriers. We strive towards a utopian version of technology that can enable agency and support migrants, refugees and internationally displaced persons who lack the basics of safety and security for self-organising. Primarily we hope a digital women's archive can respond to the call to action by the Young Feminist Fund and Association for Women's Rights and Development as they say for the global community to work together to create new spaces, new conversations and a new world for young feminists everywhere. Thank you.