Black Lives and Justice with the Archive: A Call to Action

Abstract

This commentary calls for scholars, activist, archivists, and curators to work in alliance with social justice aims to collect documents of count-history to official reports of police violence. The modern archival craze can be traced back from the influences in nineteenth-century Victorian England. Cultural Heritage workers collected and archived the materials that serviced the empire. The new cultural heritage workers of the digital age exist formally in institutions but also informally in the streets, recording, archiving, and circulating with smartphones. Digital culture brings with it an abundance of public discourse but it quickly slips from the official record without a concerted effort to save, preserve, and collect vernacular history. The ephemeral character of this digital rhetoric requires that researchers must collect materials in real time, archiving history as it is happening.

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