Power, Positionality, Community

I am delighted to see the radical empathy framework Marika Cifor and I developed in a 2016 Archivaria article taken up by scholars and practitioners in the field of digital scholarly editing. From the vantage point of 2023, feminist ethics of care is more important than ever.

In particular, K. J. Rawson’s extended treatment and application of relationships of care in the context of the Digital Transgender Archive opens up the possibilities made manifest by centering those made most vulnerable by archival decision-making, extending the practical implications of feminist ethics across space and time. As Rawson and Julia Flanders (each in their own contribution) remind us, an examination of power dynamics is at the heart of radical empathy, which, in our formulation, cannot be divorced from feminist ethics.

As Cifor and I wrote in 2016, “our approach advocates critical attention to power differentials throughout these processes.” We further clarified:

in a feminist approach, each one of these parties is considered empathetically and in relation to each other and to dominant power structures before archival decisions are made. As previously stated, an ethics of care does not erase power differentials, but rather is acutely attuned to inequities (and seeks to transform such inequities), even as it empathizes with all interested parties, including those who held and exploited positions of power.1

Five years later, in the introduction to a special issue on radical empathy in the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Cifor and I further asserted:

Empathy is radical when it centers the needs of those who are most oppressed by the dominant forces of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and colonialism. We do not ask archivists (or anyone else for that matter) from oppressed communities to empathize with their oppressors; one should not be tasked with empathizing with those who deny the validity of one’s own existence. . . . Instead, empathy must be taken up in tandem with a power analysis in order to be radical. Radical empathy should be a tool for those of us with access to power not to further entrench ourselves into the hierarchies of power, but instead to open doors behind ourselves, to make archives permeable by creating holes in our structures and systems where power can be redistributed in ways that always prioritize the needs and desires of those made vulnerable by oppressive structures. Empathy in such a practice is a means to challenge, subvert, undermine, make possible, change.2

I risk belaboring this point because it foregrounds concepts emerging from critical archival studies that also surface across this volume’s essays on digital scholarly editing. Specifically, like digital archives, digital scholarly editing could benefit from clearly articulated definitions of three related concepts: power, positionality, and community.

Power is made explicit in several of these essays and lurks just beneath the surface of others. Who has the power to make digital scholarly editions? Which authors’ works are seen as important enough to warrant such extended and microscopic attention? Which projects are seen as universal and which are seen as niche? Relatedly, which projects get funded and which do not? Which scholars are seen as authoritative enough to create and maintain digital scholarly editions? Power lies at the heart of each of these questions; a power analysis that takes racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism and other forms of oppression seriously is key to their answers.

Relatedly, what is the editor’s positionality in relation to the author and the users of digital scholarly editions? Robert Allen Warrior’s important advocacy in this volume for Indigenous intellectual sovereignty reveals the urgency of answering this question in digital scholarly editing. Digital scholarly editions do not come from nowhere; they are located in a very specific place and time, created by very specific actors with specific relationships to power structures. Here, the parallels between archival appraisal decisions and scholarly editing decisions are apparent. Editors would do well to speak the (too-often) unspoken part aloud, to explicitly position themselves and their identities in relation to the work they are doing. Here, my application of Hope Olson’s WEBCHAM (white, ethnically European, bourgeois, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied, male) framework to delineate archivists’ relationships to dominant power structures in the context of appraisal might prove a useful starting point.3 Are we sure we are the right ones to be doing this work? This question should initiate a series of others, about our identities, the responsibilities of our institutions, and who we want to serve.

And finally, we turn to the concept of “community” surfacing in several of this volume’s essays. Here, archival studies offers a cautionary tale. Within archival studies, the concept of “community archives” has been so overused that it has been rendered virtually meaningless. Community has become a euphemism for talking about minoritization, but a closer critical examination reveals that all people have community, whether they articulate it as such or not. In this way, all archives are community archives as they all catalyze a series of relationships between people. Instead, we need more specific language that more closely gets at power dynamics. For me, “independent, minoritized, identity-based community archives” more precisely defines the phenomena that I hold in interest. Other archival studies scholars have other definitions, and in the absence of shared vocabulary, misunderstandings arise. More than a decade into the turn to “community archives,” it is clear that we must articulate our specific notions of community from the outset.

Critical digital editing can learn from this discussion by not repeating the same mistakes as archival studies. Defining their community is one of the many things that the Colored Convention Project does well, as Sarah Lynn Patterson’s contribution to this volume demonstrates. CCP is not just a movement-documenting project, but a movement-building project, modeling for both archival and digital editing projects how to more explicitly define users. Who is the “community”—of creators, of participants, of users—coalescing around digital editions? The more specific an answer to this question, the more clearly defined the goals of any project can be.

When goals are clearly defined, meeting them becomes possible. When goals are met, projects may end on a victorious note. The consternation over the longevity of projects can be turned into celebration (as Ed Folsom notes about The Walt Whitman Archive): the project did what it set out to do. Looking back over the past 25 years of digital scholarly editing, it is clear that many projects did just what they set out to do. Yet when we examine these projects in light of power, positionality and community, it is clear so much more work still needs to be done. This volume provides us with a path ahead for the next 25 years.

Michelle Caswell, PhD, (she/her), is a professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where she co-directs the UCLA Community Archives Lab (https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/). At UCLA, she also serves as Executive Vice Chancellor/ Provost’s Special Advisor on Community-Engaged Scholarship. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saada.org), an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (2014), as well as more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.