Grounded in critical archival studies, Michelle Caswell’s talk ‘Urgent Archives: Catalyzing Corollary Records’ will look toward the radical politics of independent, minoritized identity-based community archives to envision new liberatory possibilities for memory work. Based on participant observation and interviews with users at community archives sites in the U.S, the talk will explore how communities activate digital collections to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression. Caswell will explore the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, ultimately arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present. 

Michelle Caswell 

Michelle Caswell, PhD, is Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Caswell co-directs a team of students at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab, which explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organizations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive, an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of the books Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge Press, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).  

Black Archives Sweden 

Black Archives Sweden (BAS) is an archive that centers Black presence, memory, and cultural production in Sweden. Moving across exhibitions, public programs, and collaborations, the archive navigates questions of visibility, erasure, and historical narration, offering counternarratives and fugitive forms of remembering and imagining. Rooted in experimentation, BAS explores alternative modes of gathering, making, and holding space, in which archives become not only repositories but also living practices of care, creation, and collective memory. BAS is represented in the panel by artist and filmmaker Jonelle Twum, whose work engages themes of migration, memory, materiality, collectivity, desire, and the body—often through the lens of Black feminist thought and the attentive rhythms of the everyday.   




The event is part of HEIRLOOM’s program track ‘Unfiled’, which seeks to highlight the many unexamined and neglected histories that populate the field of art history. 

The event is organised in collaboration with PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies at University of Copenhagen and DATALOSS research project at The Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at University of Copenhagen.