n. (also memory-work)the support of memory through the transmission and preservation of historical evidence, including by agents other than archivists, sometimes with the intent of healing, equity, and/or justicePiggott 2005, 310The memory role of archives and the memory work of archivists are rarely direct and not nearly as dominant as implied in our rhetoric. ¶ A more qualified recasting here should begin by drawing on one of the long-established conclusions of memory studies to accept that all memory is inherently social. The identity of individuals, social aggregates and society at large, their consciousness of sameness and understanding of the world, despite time and physical distance, are sustained and changed by a number of factors that include the ebb and flow of collective memory. In turn, which groupings remember and forget what, how, and why, can be shaped and facilitated by archives, and also by social phenomena such as class, gender and power relationships within families, collectivities and society as a whole. Each question—what? who? how? why?—can be affected by archives and the work of archivists, in combination with monuments, commemoration and landscape. The ‘living memory’ of orally sustained and transmitted knowledge can also play its part. Finally, the exercise of individual, group and societal memory can be affected by external forces such as disasters (e.g. fire), war (e.g. cultural genocide) and colonialism (e.g. expropriation and repatriation of archives).Ketelaar 2005, 47Annette Kuhn reported on her ‘memory work’, using photographs from her family album and linking them with other public and private memory texts, discovering that an individual’s memories: ¶ [quotation] spread into an extended network of meanings that bring together the person with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, and the historical. Memory work makes it possible to explore connections between ‘public’ historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender and ‘personal’ memory.Harris 2011, 116Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, South Africa received praise from around the world for the way in which it sought to deal with its oppressive past. Its post-apartheid governments insisted on the making of a future through intense engagement with memory of the colonial and apartheid eras. Memory work ranged from the endeavour of the TRC, to the flowering of new museums and archives, from the investigations underpinning the land restitution process to the writing of new histories for schoolchildren, from the research supporting special pensions and the location of missing persons to the use of freedom of information instruments by civil society.Cook 2013, 111Recordkeeping systems are now consciously designed to prevent future abuses and to promote better accountability for public affairs and governance through creating and maintaining better records, especially in a digital world. Illegal destruction of records is often exposed where such action denies justice. Truth and Reconciliations Commissions, first in South Africa, and now in numerous countries, have been established in part to create archives in order to promote the very healing and memory work referenced earlier in relation to the work of Eric Ketelaar. Archival web sites appeared where citizens seeking knowledge about themselves, and their communities, could have much easier access to the holdings of established archives.Gould and Harris 2014, 5The powerful will tend to use memory resources to fulfill the end of remaining powerful. Memory work dominated by particular interests—whether of the state, of the private sector or of civil society—is unavoidably elitist and creates metanarratives that drown out voices that cause discomfort, voices that are marginalized. Liberatory memory work is about troubling such metanarratives and making space for ‘other’ voices.Wickner 2019, 19Looking beyond institutional archives, the third case discusses informal memory practices, social media interaction, and online creativity. Although taking place outside of memory institutions, each of these practices has its own repertoire or set of conventions. One implication for archivists is the value of thinking beyond institutional best practices to recognize memory work. By understanding the purpose of such repertoires, archivists can better know how their archiving efforts contribute and are welcome, or do not and are not—linking back to de jesus’s discussion of consent.VanCour and Shepperd 2020, 21As cultural memory work, radio preservation moves beyond an antiquarian interest in “saving the past” to embrace an agenda aimed at actively diversifying the historical record, enriching our sense of collective audio heritage, and securing cultural resources for building new social identities and imagining other possible futures.Winn 2020, 5–6While the functional competencies of archivists have expanded to cover many flavors of recorded history, the profession itself occupies a relatively narrow domain of memory work. Anthropocene theorists like Chakrabarty distinguish even further between written records (the common domain of archivy), recorded history, and “deep history.” If the demands of future memory work diverge from the competencies of archivists, it is incumbent upon archivists to adapt or die; memory work will continue regardless.Moore 2020Stacie Williams, a Blackivists member and director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago Library, refers to her philosophy of archiving as “memory work.” It’s intended to be inclusive of not just scholars, but people who dedicate themselves to cultural preservation outside of academia. ¶ “As underrepresented folks, we have not always had access to the documentation,” Williams says about archives and historical records. “We have even been barred from creating the documentation. Even just the act of stopping people from learning how to read or write, or making it illegal or punishable, stops people from being able to communicate their stories. Memory work as a term respects the ways that Black people have been traditionally locked out of those spaces.”Caswell 2021, 13“Memory work,” as Stacie Williams notes, encompasses more than labor performed by MLIS-holding professionals in formal institutions, like libraries, archives, and museums, which often exclude people of color. Instead, the term “memory work” acknowledges the informal spaces in which knowledge is passed across generations.Jones 2022, 1Scholars raise the concern that describing archival work as memory work, either directly or indirectly, removes a critical understanding of subjectivity from the archival materials and instead imposes that subjectivity on the archive itself, ultimately prioritizing the institution of the archive over the narrative of collections to convey their own histories. Memory’s definitional function within the archives is necessary in contextualizing archival work and the relationship between archives, archival narratives, and the documents and lived experiences that archives endeavor to remember.Jones 2022, 6Whether memory is occurring within academic, independent, or communal settings, the institutionalization of memory presents a series of traumas and victories which could each potentially incite moments of violence. The emphasis is placed more so on how the thing is remembered. This is another area where memory work demands active engagement rather than passive curation. Remembering events that are traumatic to a community must be actively considered and discussed within the archive, as those memories are preserved and inevitably contextualized in collections with an archival narrative. This is, of course, not nearly as controversial as it was more than a decade ago. The sociocultural functions of memory are nevertheless a crucial element of memory’s importance to archival scholars.Friedel and Baetz 2022, 6Yet, at the same time, public artworks on academic campuses are also reflections of the university’s “official” stance on the narratives and shared memories that its landscape carries. It is notable that the memory work reflected in these art pieces is often contested by university administrators, alumni, current students, faculty, staff, or community members, and revised to fit changing modes of memory.Prosper 2024, 40For example, interviewees at the Black Bottom Archives articulate a relationship between records and memory that points to members and volunteers theorizing around records and archives to meet the needs, demands, and values of community members rather than to meet preexisting definitions in the archival discipline. Such theorizing reflects “Black archival practice,” which is a relationship to memory and evidence that recognizes the complexity of living, documenting, and remembering Black life and “Black memory work,” which I define as the production of archives and records that keep visible the presence and experiences of Black peoples that would have been otherwise destroyed or disregarded.Fernández, Nichols, and Park 2024Named spaces in U.S. higher education institutions confer messages, overt or implicit, about who these institutions do and do not value on their campuses. Higher education, as part of the broader society, is not immune from the recently reinvigorated, social, cultural, and political memorial justice movement focused on the removal of confederate symbols of white supremacy (monuments, statues, flags, building names). Connecting to the Black Lives Movement in its calls for reparative institutional and systemic racial justice, memorial justice, and memory work re-imagine landscapes by making visible “contributions, experiences, memories, and struggles of marginalized peoples” (Brasher 2023, p. 249).
Notes
As of 2025, the use of this term is unsettled. Usually it is used in contradistinction to traditional archival practice, with emphases on nonarchivist practitioners, the rejection of archival neutrality, and the use and relevance of records in the present. Frequently, but not always, it carries the further implication of activist archival practice, seeking to use archives to center marginalized voices and advance social justice. At other times this latter use of the term is qualified as liberatory memory work.
