Archival Workers as Climate Advocates

Abstract

Real-life examples of climate response under material constraints capture the risks facing archives, records, and archival workers amid environmental change, and the factors that complicate climate action. In this dissertation, I sought to understand how climate, environment, and ecology shape archival workers' experiences, practices, and perspectives on the future, including their norms and expectations for making change. I used three interconnected methods: a critical review of six decades of scholarly and professional literature; a literary analysis of archival practices in seven climate fiction texts; and interviews with 13 archivists concerned about climate change. The core argument of this dissertation is that forms of slow violence – Nixon's term for harm that “occurs gradually and out of sight” – produce unresolvable double binds, which catalyze archival workers into a community of climate advocates. This research finds that archival workers are trying to pursue principled work in conditions that prevent them from doing so – not only the material limitations of work sites, but also political obstacles to taking climate action. They develop politically expedient strategies and tactics in response to local circumstances, while using public statements and campaigns to extend their advocacy across the field. As climate advocates, they oscillate between positions as insiders and outsiders in the field, never settling in one stance from which to effect change. While they share a commitment that archives matter to climate response, complexity and contradiction hold them together as a community of advocates. Two key points of disagreement lie at the buzzing center of this community: first, whether archives are primarily resources or obstacles to climate action; and second, to what extent archival climate responses should align with or resist power relations that organize the state of the field (and the planet). There's ample knowledge in the archives field of the significance of climate change, the environmental impacts to and of archival work, the need for archivists to respond to the crisis, and methods for responding. However, such answers make little difference in everyday change-making, if they don't also face head-on the material conditions of archival work and the political relations that determine and reproduce those conditions.