IS doctoral candidate recognized for best article of the year in ACA’s journal Archivaria, with 2024 Lamb Prize.
Anna Robinson-Sweet, a fourth-year PhD candidate in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, has recently been honored with the 2024 W. Kaye Lamb Prize, by the Association of Canadian Archivists. Her article, “Caring for Archives of Incarceration: The Ethics of Carceral Collecting at University Archives,” published in the ACA journal, Archivaria, has been recognized as the best overall article of the year. Robinson-Sweet’s award was announced at the ACA Awards Ceremony in June.
“Robinson-Sweet’s research about how archivists are responding to the ethical challenges presented by the collection and stewardship of records related to incarceration is a clear, well-written and carefully considered article,” reads a citation from the ACA. “This study highlights the connections between academic interests and initiatives with implications for archival practitioners and activities. Grounded with interviews where archivists share insights into their work, these responses are meaningfully contextualized by the author who provides concrete actions for how to move this work into the future in an ethical and liberatory manner.”
Robinson-Sweet achieved a graduate certificate in digital humanities at UCLA, her MLIS at Simmons University, and her bachelor’s degree in art at Yale. At UCLA, she works with the Community Archives Lab and teaches in the Community Engagement and Social Change program. Robinson-Sweet has worked as a community and labor organizer, oral historian, and archivist, is involved in abolitionist movement work, and creates art about public history and memory.
What inspired your article, “Caring for Archives of Incarceration: The Ethics of Carceral Collecting at University Archives”?
My research is generally on archives that document state violence and how those archives can be used by people who are trying to get accountability for that violence. For my dissertation, I’m specifically looking at archives related to the carceral system in the U.S.
This article and research were my entree into qualitative research on that topic. I’d read a lot, and written papers for classes, but I hadn’t conducted my own research, so I was eager to do that. I was particularly interested in a trend I noticed of archives taking an interest in documenting the carceral system in the U.S.
Most of the records about prisons and jails and detention centers are coming from the perspective of the state and the government. Historically, there hasn’t been a lot of efforts to document the system from the perspective of people that have been impacted by it, at least not in archives that are institutionally-based, like university archives or cultural institutions. There has always been community-centered work on that, but I was just really interested in an uptick in that collecting at places like universities.
What kinds of new challenges has it presented to archivists who are doing that work?
I worked as an archivist before starting my PhD, so I’m always interested in how people who are on the ground doing the work are confronting these challenges and figuring them out. The project was to look at how archivists are handling this material.
This is a new area of collecting for university archives. I was interested in how the university context affected the ability to steward these collections positively or negatively. That was one big question. Another one was how archivists are describing the challenges of doing this work and how they’re dealing with those challenges.
One of the big questions and challenges was around consent. Archivists think a lot about making sure they have consent from donors and that they’re providing access to collections in a way that is not going against the wishes of the donors.
The goal of many recent archival projects on incarceration is to humanize people impacted by the system, but how do you balance that with ensuring that [archivists are] getting consent to collect materials and provide access to them? This is especially complex given that many of the people who are still incarcerated may exist in situations that compromise their ability to fully give consent or fully be involved in the archiving of their own materials, in large part due to the communication barriers put up by the carceral system.
Who mainly are the donors of these materials?
In a lot of cases, it’s the [incarcerated or formerly incarcerated] person themselves, donating their own materials – and I should [say] donating in quotes, because sometimes they are paid for their materials. Increasingly – and this is one thing in the paper I talk about as a kind of challenge – third-party dealers [acquire] the materials from the person who created them and then [sell] them to collecting institutions. Family members and friends also [are donors]. And then sometimes, some of the collections are organizational records, so sometimes it’s the organization or group donating the materials.
What are some of the specific materials?
It’s a lot of personal papers, letters and writings. Some of the collections I interviewed people about include grievance forms that people submitted to prison authorities or administrative materials from people dealing with prison authorities. There is a lot of artwork, some oral histories, and also some legal materials and documentation.
Could the archiving of these records affect outcomes for some of these incarcerated people – could it possibly exonerate them or provide more evidence in an ongoing case?
That’s the potential good side. But the potential other side is that you’re acquiring and providing access to materials that could further incriminate people or further subject them to retribution of some kind.
I think the goal of the archivists and archives that are doing the work is to humanize people who have gone through this, to increase awareness about the impacts of the system. A lot of people talk about narrative change … changing the whole way we as a society talk and think about the carceral system and people who have been incarcerated.
Another archive I’ve looked at is a community-based archive called the Visiting Room Project in Louisiana. They’ve done interviews with people who are serving life without parole sentences in Louisiana State Penitentiary, people who are basically sentenced to die in in prison. They did these beautiful interviews with people who had those sentences, and as a result of that work, a number of those people were actually resentenced and released. So, it can have that profound material impact as well.
For these [university-based] archives, they’re thinking on a larger scale of narrative change [rather] than thinking about individual cases. And if anything, they skew towards [not wanted to be] responsible for anything that is going to impact someone’s legal case.
I think that’s another contradiction I was grappling with in the research, because these are university archives – the primary audience for them is scholars and researchers. People will be able to produce new scholarship and have new understandings of the sociological impacts of the carceral state on a bigger scale and be able to include those firsthand perspectives and voices, which I think have been missing from scholarship on prisons.
Would you say UCLA is a pioneer in studying carceral recordkeeping?
UCLA is definitely a pioneer in studying community-based archival work. People like Dr. [Michelle] Caswell, Dr. [Tonia] Sutherland, and Dr. [Thuy] Vo Dang, the three co-directors of the Community Archives Lab, are very much leaders in that realm – Dr. Sutherland also works specifically on carceral archives. She’s written amazing articles and a book on this topic and coined the term “carceral archives,” that I use a lot in the research.
How has your experience been in the UCLA Department of Information Studies?
My advisor Dr. Caswell is amazing. I’ve been really fortunate to work with her and the other faculty, and in information studies there are wonderful students. There are so many great people.
What is your dissertation on?
It’s a similar topic on archives that document firsthand experiences in the carceral system, but instead of limiting it to university archives, I’m looking at two community archives and one university archive that do this work. I’m doing an ethnographic study of the three and doing a lot of interviews with people, not just the archivists.
I’m looking at the people who create the archives or donate the archives, people who use them, things like that. In my dissertation, I’m more interested in looking at how the materials are activated and used and why they’re created in the first place, as opposed to the article, which is more about the archive and the actual processing of the materials once they get to the archives.
What is the advantage for scholars, for universities, researchers, writers, and journalists who benefit from access to these records?
One of the things that is tough about the work [is] there’s an urgent material need in the community for people to be released or to get remedy for some of the things they’ve suffered in the prison system. A lot of the archivists I talked to feel strongly that they would like the materials to be used by advocates and community members, to do advocacy work and to get actual material impacts for people who have suffered from the system. Whether the university context or the academic archive allows for the activation of materials in that way is an open question, because this is such a new area of collecting.