About

Michelle Caswell is a Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is also an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Asian American Studies. Her research focuses on archives, memory, public history, and social justice, and has been widely cited across various fields. Caswell's work contributes to building a critical feminist approach to archival studies. She serves as the Co-Director of UCLA's Community Archives Lab and is the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive. In 2017, she co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies on Critical Archival Studies. Her most recent book, "Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work," published by Routledge in 2021, argues that archivists should actively disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond traditional archival practices such as diverse collecting and inclusive description. Grounded in critical archival studies, the book critiques dominant Western archival theories and practices as oppressive by design and highlights the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research at community archives including the South Asian American Digital Archive, Caswell explores how minoritized communities use records to build solidarities, challenge linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression. She examines the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, advocating for archival disruptions that focus on the liberatory effects of memory work in the present rather than the past or future. Caswell's first book, "Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia," was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2014 as part of their Critical Human Rights series. This book won the 2015 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for Best Publication from the Society of American Archivists.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Psychology
• World Wide Web
• Public relations
• Art
• History
• Archaeology
• Internet privacy
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Envisioning a Paid Community Archives Internship Program: Challenges and Opportunities

  Journal of Education for Library and Information Science · 2024-07-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article provides background on community archiving as it relates to a group of faculty members currently working together to address the challenge of reimagining archival education to center non-dominant archival traditions and the restructuring of internship programs to provide financial compensation, by asking how MLIS programs might transform to better serve both minoritized communities and minoritized students. We focus on MLIS Education and Dominant Archival Theories and Practices, to explore the challenges of and possibilities for a large-scale North American effort to support paid internships at community archives.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘The Archive’ is Not an Archives

  Archives · 2023-12-18 · 6 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Little of the humanistic inquiry at ‘the archival turn’ has acknowledged the vast intellectual contribution of archival studies as a field of theory and praxis in its own right. This chapter argues that the refusal of humanities scholars to engage with scholarship in archival studies is a gendered and classed failure in which humanities scholars—even those whose work focuses on gender and class—have been blind to the intellectual contributions and labour of a field that has been construed as predominantly female and professional (that is, not academic), and as such, unworthy of engagement. The chapter proposes concrete solutions for bridging this intellectually unsustainable divide through workshops, collaborative scholarship, and interdisciplinary reading clusters that educate humanities scholars about the intellectual contribution of archival studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Black Lives Still Matter for LIS: An Introduction to the Special Issue

  Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies · 2023-07-17

  articleOpen access

  This introduction highlights the articles in the special issue Library and Information Studies and the Mattering of Black Lives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “It's a Trap”: Complicating Representation in Community-Based Archives

  The American Archivist · 2022 · 13 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  ABSTRACT This article contributes to ongoing discourse that highlights oppressive institutional attitudes and approaches toward archiving materials that document the lived experiences of historically marginalized and minoritized people and communities. Through analyzing focus groups and interviews with members of minoritized communities about community archives, this article outlines four key tensions that exist around representation: holding conflicting desires of how to honor older generations; navigating methods of respecting privacy and cultural values; acknowledging the importance of preserving community history versus individual histories; and developing strategies for protecting the community. Together, these tensions illustrate the nuances of representation in archives: how members of minoritized communities navigate complex, often conflicting, affects within archival materials and how they protect themselves and future generations through visibility and invisibility. The authors introduce the concept of representational subversion , which they define as the ways in which historically minoritized communities balance and respect both their representation and erasure in society and archives, working through the tensions of honor, cultural nuance, individual value, and community protection. Representational subversion emerges among minoritized people/communities when they use their agency to protect themselves and the communities in which they find a sense of belonging. In explicating four tensions that mark representational subversion, the authors acknowledge a minoritized community's rights to be forgotten/forget (alongside their right to be remembered), to self-preservation, and to self-determination, and demonstrate the reach and perpetual threat of white supremacy in archives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies

  The American Historical Review · 2021 · 33 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  Abstract Given the blurring of boundaries between historians and archivists in the digital realm, this article urges historians to pay more attention to discussions surrounding digital records and archival practices emerging from critical archival studies. More specifically, this article identifies and summarizes seven key themes and corresponding debates about digital records in contemporary archival studies scholarship: (1) materiality, (2) appraisal, (3) context, (4) use, (5) scale, (6) relationships, and (7) sustainability. A deeper knowledge of digital archival theory and practice—how records came to be in digital archives, the infrastructures that maintain them, and the tools necessary to provide access to and context for them—is not ancillary to historical work, but provides important context to do digital history better.

  PublisherDOI

• Feeling Liberatory Memory Work On the Archival Uses of Joy and Anger

  Archivaria (Association of Canadian Archivists) · 2021-06-28 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Greetings from your failed neighbour state to the south.Or, should I say, a completely successful white supremacist state to the south, since the US has been very successful with that foundational goal.I am speaking to you from the unceded land of

  Publisher

• Imagining liberatory memory work 1

  2021-05-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Examining Concepts of the Public: Who is Served by Information Services?

  Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2021-10-01

  articleCorresponding

  Abstract The goal of this panel is to define foundational social and epistemic “boundaries” within the “public sphere” that libraries and information institutions typically consider when defining their constituents of interest. Defining what we mean by the “public” or “communities” in “public libraries,” for example, is important, not only because the concept of a “public” is plural and contextually situated, but also because the boundaries of said public are often artificially outlined depending on social and cultural aims. To what degree do information services act like politics, strategically defining “community” to exclude as much as include? In politics, the “public” and its representative rights vary from state‐to‐state and county to county. Is this variation the same as regional differences in reading, described, for example, in The Geography of Reading (Wilson, 1938). Is it more overtly racial (e.g. Lipsitz 2011) or political (e.g. Bishop 2009)? What is a “citizen” in this space, and how does that differ from our construction of the public? Which publics are being denied their needs through the boundaries erected by these institutions and systems?

  PublisherDOI

• Radical Empathy in Archival Practice Poster and Postcards

  Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies · 2021-05-21 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  This poster and accompanying postcards were created by Gracen Brilmyer for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Science (JCLIS) special issue on Radical Empathy in Archival Practice. The poster and postcards visualize and embody the four archival relationships proposed by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor in their 2016 Archivaria article, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives,” in addition to three new relationships proposed by others.
 You are encouraged to complete this poster by:
 
 Filling in each of the 7 illustrated relationships (dotted line box) on postcards
 Mailing postcards to someone who embodies this relationship
 Appending the postcards to the poster, or writing in the relationships
 
 Additionally, since poster printing can be cost prohibitive, we have also included a "Printer-Friendly" version of the poster, which can easily be printed on multiple 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper and assembled. 
 Pre-print first published online 05/21/2021

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Revisiting a Feminist Ethics of Care in Archives: An Introductory Note

  Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies · 2021-06-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this featured commentary, Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor revisit their article, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives”* and update its insights to reflect care work in our present time of crisis. Pre-print first published online 06/11/2021   *Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives,” Archivaria 81 (Spring 2016): 23-43.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Marika Cifor

  11 shared

• Gracen Brilmyer

  McGill University

  6 shared

• Noah Geraci

  University of California, Riverside

  5 shared

• Jimmy Zavala

  4 shared

• Joyce Gabiola

  3 shared

• Ricardo L. Punzalan

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  3 shared

• Tonia Sutherland

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Alda Allina Migoni

  2 shared

Labs

• UCLA Community Archives LabPI

Awards & honors

• 2020, Hugh A. Taylor Prize for best paper published in Archi…
• 2017, Winner, Fellows Ernst Posner Award for Best Paper Publ…
• 2015, Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award for Best Publicatio…