Join us for our fifth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives. Books are selected every 6 weeks by the group, and may cover topics such as archival theory and practice, historical understandings, current issues and trends in information science, informational technologies, etc....we’re open to suggestions!

Our next book selection is Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia by Michelle Caswell

Publisher’s Description: Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering.

Along with being a LAAC Advisory Board Member, Michelle Caswell is an assistant professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is also an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

The group will meet on Wednesday, January 13th from 6:30-8 pm at Canter’s Restaurant (419 N. Fairfax Ave). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot. 

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!

Join us for the fourth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives. Books are selected every 6 weeks by the group, and may cover topics such as archival theory and practice, historical understandings, current issues and trends in information science, informational technologies, etc....we’re open to suggestions!

Our next book selection is Archive Stories edited by Antoinette Burton

Publisher’s Description: Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there.

Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member.

The group will meet on Wednesday, November 4, from 6:30-8 pm at Alcove Cafe & Bakery (1929 Hillhurst Ave). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot.