Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance

Records documenting human rights abuse raise a host of critical challenges for archivists, scholars, activists, survivors, and source communities. Who owns such records? Which stakeholders have the legal and/or ethical authority to make decisions about their stewardship? When should community-based collections, personal records, oral histories or artistic expressions comment on, respond to, or fill in the gaps left by official state documentation?

Dominant Western archival theories trace the provenance of records to their creators. By this narrow estimation, many records documenting human rights abuse belong to the abusers who created them or successor states. However, recent developments in critical archival studies challenge dominant Western notions of provenance, expanding it (as in community or social provenance) (Bastian 2006, Douglas 2017), retooling it for liberatory aims such as crip provenance (Brilmyer 2022), land as provenance (Ghaddar 2022), or provenancial fabulation (Lapp 2023), or abandoning it altogether (Drake 2021). Meanwhile, an upcoming special issue of Archival Science edited by Jeannette Bastian, Stanley Griffin, and James Lowry will address emerging conceptions of provenance in detail.

This renewed interest in provenance has opened up critical questions as provenance relates specifically to the ownership, stewardship, and uses of records documenting human rights abuse.

If you are interested in these questions, we would like to invite you attend the upcoming Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance Symposium.

Location: 
University of Sydney Business School
ABS Seminar Room 2290
Click here for map

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This Symposium is hosted by the Indonesian Trauma Testimony Project (ITTP). The ITTP was established in 2018 with the aim of preserving survivor-held materials and testimonies from the time of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide.