current research
Forgetting in the Digital Age: The Use of Culturally-Relevant Digital Technologies by Afro-Mexican Communities for Retention and Enhancement of Memory and Group Identity
This project is a collaborative initiative between with members of the Costa Chican community that empowers Afro-Mexican communities by developing internet-based technologies to engage the possibilities of enabling those communities to serve their own cultural, social, and political visions. Part of this initiative is the development of a browser-based digital archives built around the cultural protocols and needs of the Costa Chican Afro-Mexican community that facilitates the change of information, preserve histories, generate diasporic identities, and share resources that may enable collective political and social causes to be realized.
The Dynamics of Race and Remembering in a “Colorblind” Society: A Case Study of
Racial Paradigms and Archival Education in Mexico
This study used Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica as a case study to understand archival education in Mexico. In doing so, this study sought to provide insight on how absences of Mexicans of African descent from the official record and recordkeeping came into being in Mexico; to understand the role that education of archival professionals might play in addressing or contributing to these absences; and to generate recommendations for how this underdocumentation might be partly remediated by changing what is currently taught in formal archival education at the university level. The study also examined the extent to which racial paradigms, specifically that of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), might influence archival education in Mexico.
Pluralizing the Archival Paradigm: A Needs Assessment for Archival Education in Pacific Rim Communities (Pacific Rim Project) --more info
The project looks across national boundaries by means of surveys of archival educators, repositories and other key stakeholders in Pacific Rim nations in Asia, Australia, North and South America and the Pacific island nations. It has also looked within cultural and ethnic communities such as Indigenous, diasporic and immigrant populations to examine their needs and circumstances. Indeed, it is the diversity of the Pacific Rim region that poses one of the primary challenges to archival education and to the archival paradigm more broadly. The interactions of these communities in an increasingly globalized economy and technological and communications environment all raise cultural, social and policy issues, as do the history of past relationships that have resulted in the layering of recordkeeping traditions, issues of replevin and joint national ownership of records as a result of colonization. The challenges raised by migrant populations as well as the transnational movements of students seeking archival education programs in various parts of the world are also addressed by this research.
