Human Rights Archives and
the Problems of Provenance: Conference call for papers
Records documenting human rights abuse raise a host of critical challenges for archivists, scholars, activists, survivors, and source communities. Who owns such records? Which stakeholders have the legal and/or ethical authority to make decisions about their stewardship and access? How should conflicting claims to ownership and authority be resolved? When should community-based collections, personal records, oral histories or artistic expressions comment on, respond to, or fill in the gaps left by official state documentation? Who is best situated to undertake such efforts? What are the competing priorities and differing approaches of state archives and community archives?
Dominant Western archival theories trace the provenance of records to their creators. By this narrow estimation, many records documenting human rights abuse belong to the abusers who created them or successor states. However, recent developments in critical archival studies challenge dominant Western notions of provenance, expanding it (as in community or social provenance) (Bastian, 2006; Douglas, 2017), retooling it for liberatory aims such as crip provenance (Brilmyer, 2022), land as provenance (Ghaddar, 2022), or provenancial fabulation (Lapp, 2023), or abandoning it altogether (Drake, 2016). An upcoming
special issue of Archival Science edited by Jeannette Bastian, Stanley Griffin, and James Lowry will address emerging conceptions of provenance in detail.
This renewed interest in provenance has opened up critical questions as provenance relates specifically to the ownership, stewardship, and uses of records documenting human rights abuse.
We welcome proposals for paper presentations, panels, workshops, and artistic presentations from archivists, archival studies scholars, human rights activists, historians, area studies specialists, artists, community organizers and others, that address any of the following or related questions:
- What would a survivor-centered approach (Caswell, 2014) to the provenance of human rights records look like?
- Why does provenance matter? What are the implications of provenance on legal and ethical frameworks?
- How is the provenance of human rights records complicated by digitization and digital access?
- Where do imaginary records (Caswell and Gilliland, 2016) fit in conceptions of provenance?
- How can trauma-informed approaches and a feminist ethics of care (Caswell and Cifor, 2016) inform archival interventions on human rights records?
- What special considerations surround records that concern people who were children at the time of the abuses?
- How have records documenting human rights abuse been activated to support healing, legal adjudication, and memorialization, and by whom? What do these activations tell us about the conception of provenance?
- What insights do trauma-informed approaches to archives (Wright and Laurent, 2021) yield about the provenance of human rights records?
- Does provenance have a temporal dimension? Does provenance change with successive generations as human rights abuse recedes with time?
- Who has the right to forget? Who has the right to control access? Who has the right to destroy records?
- Does the consideration of human rights records call us to reconsider nondominant conceptions of provenance or dispense with the concept in its entirety?
Call for papers deadline extended
Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words for paper presentations and no more than 500 words for panels, along with a brief bio (around 100 words) to
ittp.symposium@sydney.edu.au by Friday 31 January 2025.
After the convening, accepted papers will be considered for a 2026 special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies.The 1965-66 Indonesian Genocide
In 1965–66, the Indonesian military coordinated and supervised the murder of approximately half a million members and associates of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Hundreds of thousands more were detained in camps for periods ranging from a few months to many years, where they suffered torture, starvation, disease and forced labour. These massacres established the ‘New Order’, a military authoritarian regime which lasted until 1998. For decades, former detainees, their families and their associates were subject to a regime of reduced civil rights and repression. At the same time, the New Order policed an official version of these events which celebrated the killings.
Research into the anti-Communist purges has always been challenging and necessarily clandestine, even during the brief period of greater political openness immediately following the fall of the New Order in 1998. The fear of speaking publicly about these events is well-founded; there have been reprisals against those who have investigated the 1965–66 killings, and Indonesia’s current path of return to authoritarianism has brought a sharp rise in neo-fascist and military-backed attacks against those who speak openly about past atrocities. These factors have consistently hindered research on the anti-Communist killings and their aftermath, and there remains much unknown about the fundamental causes, events and consequences of the 1965 mass violence.
While the military’s command role in the violence has recently been conclusively proven, the available primary source evidence has shed little light on the role of enablers, supporters and collaborators in the military operation. The generation of direct witnesses to these events is now rapidly passing away, but this project has a unique and extremely urgent opportunity to gain unprecedented access to extensive collections of previously unstudied primary materials created by those witnesses. These materials are the collections of testimonies and documentation amassed by survivor organisations and communities after 1998—held by aging custodians, often in secret—and which now face imminent loss. In the absence of an official state-run archive, they are the only remaining comprehensive, unused source of primary materials that are likely ever to be available to researchers.
