This dialogue is an extension of the presentation delivered at ICA-SUV in Glasgow, Scotland (October 2024), titled “Looking in the Mirror: Praxis, Positioning, and the Discovery of ‘Archival Banditry’.”
The moderators will highlight the five core justice-oriented practices of archival banditry and analyze their essential relevance and functionality. We begin with the premise that archivists and other memory workers wish to continue responding to the call for justice work and are interested in discussing the complex environments and dynamics they may encounter while building archives and relationships that reflect the richness of collective human experience. As Verne Harris has noted, archivists have “an ethical imperative… and their professional work is situated on the trajectory of society’s collective journey, not within the bounds of a timeless ivory tower.”