Can Community Predicate a Caring Archive?

This is a research paper that discusses the developing consensus in the community archives literature and ultimately critiques it for failing to live up to its own ethical commitments, viz. Ethics of Care. Referencing Carol Gilligan and especially Nel Noddings, in it I argue that the categories of community and care are fundamentally incompatible. I suggest an intervention inspired by Jessica Benjamin towards intersubjectivity in the archive that opens a door to reframing what community archives seek to do in order to recover an emancipatory archival practice.This project coincided with my leading of a reading group on community archives in the Pratt Institute SAA chapter. This helped me gain a relatively well-rounded understanding of the literature and the developing consensus in community archives theory as articulated by Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and others. Part of this included reading the ur-texts of feminist care ethics, including Gilligan and Noddings, and I became frustrated with a less-than-congruous relationship between the ethics of care as described in Noddings and the emphasis on community as subject in Caswell. This was my starting point that allowed me to begin the immanent critique of community archives, which led me to my thesis, which looks beyond the community for a caring archives. I continuously brought my argument into conversation with other major voices in archives.

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Jack McKernan

archivist / librarian / historian

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