“JUST DO THE WORK”: SOCIAL, REPARATIVE, AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AT AMERICAN ACADEMIC ARCHIVES

Abstract

The early 2020s have been years of great change across the United States – amid a global pandemic, George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis focused national and worldwide attention on anti-Black violence, and the subsequent spate of protests around the world marked a shift in institutional acceptability of Black Lives Matter as a strategic priority rather than a “fringe” or radical view. That movement has had direct impacts on the archival field, generating a wealth of professional talks and other disseminations that aim to shed light on the history of archives as institutions that uphold white supremacy and discuss the opportunities and challenges of conducting justice work. Challenges to this work are currently exacerbated by moves since early 2025 to halt or curb these practices in the wake of the 2024 US presidential election. Despite the steady increase of published work on the relationship between justice and archives in the last 15 years, and a more recent explosion of social, reparative, and restorative justice work within archives and by archivists, there have not been localized, in-depth, systematic studies of challenges to implementing and engaging in social justice as an archival imperative within institutional settings. Academic archives in particular have begun to grapple with the legacies of slavery that built and funded many academic institutions, and how that past continues to echo today. Without in-depth studies of how these relatively new priorities have been carried out (or not carried out), we cannot understand the practice of archival justice on the ground. This dissertation examines the role of social, reparative, and restorative justice in academic archives, investigating the gap between published archival literature and practice through an interview study of archival practitioners at academic institutions that are engaging in racial justice work, supported by and triangulated with qualitative content analysis of a corpus comprising documents sourced from academic archives’ websites related to archival justice. Though the American archival field continues to reinforce the whiteness and Eurocentrism that remain embedded in professional standards, norms, and practices, archivists engaging in justice work do so in a myriad of ways which are explored in this dissertation. I argue that there is ample evidence of racial justice activities in academic archives, with new findings demonstrating from how deeply ideas of archival justice have permeated American academic archival practice, as shown by nearly three-quarters of the documents within the document corpus study sample containing language around justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion. This dissertation establishes catalysts or levers for change that push racial justice forward at universities, as well as clarifying challenges to engaging in archival justice work beyond the limits on staff time and funding, such as pushing against established institutional narratives, institutional politics and structures, and state and regional politics. Additionally this dissertation sheds light on how academic archivists are defining success in their archival justice engagements, sheds light on how archivists doing the work see justice in relation to their other job duties, and reveals that reparative description has become one of the most popular methods of engaging with racial justice in academic archives. This project uniquely contributes to the archival field by identifying thosemany of the myriad forms that archival justice currently takes, including archival justice actions,; lays out challenges to engaging in archival justice work,; defines successes,; and provides a window into archival practice at a critical time in American history. New insights include establishing categories of types of archival justice actions that archivists are engaging in currently, including increased community, student, and faculty collaboration, creating positions dedicated to archival justice, rewriting policies and redefining mission and vision statements, conducting diversity audits of collections, and increased mentorship in order to diversify the pipeline to archives and library positions. This research study also reveals catalysts for change within academic institutions, such as the power of student activism in effecting change, the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests in summer 2020 in moving racial justice to the forefront at universities, and the critical role of university leadership in making racial archival justice a priority; identifying barriers to racial justice beyond those common to cultural heritage work, including the challenge of troubling established institutional narratives and the risks of engaging in justice work given local, regional, and national politics.