Founder and co-director of the Community Archives Lab in the UCLA Department of Information Studies will share expertise in community-engaged scholarship.
UCLA Professor of Information Studies Michelle Caswell has been appointed to serve as inaugural special advisor to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt on community-engaged scholarship. This appointment will further the University’s aims to deepen its engagement with Los Angeles, one of the goals of UCLA’s 2023-28 strategic plan.
Among Caswell’s duties in this role are leading efforts to advance the recognition and evaluation of community-engaged and public impact scholarship, as well as creative activity, in academic personnel review; help address institutional barriers to community-engaged research; network with campus colleagues to connect community-engaged scholarship to other institutional priorities and initiatives; and advise on the development of metrics to track the quality and impact of UCLA’s community partnerships.
A member of the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies faculty since 2012, and an affiliated member of the Asian American studies department, Caswell’s research focuses on supporting community-based archives, assessing the public impact of digital memory work and building critical archival theory. She served as interim chair of the information studies department from 2021–22. As founder and co-director of the UCLA Community Archives Lab since 2016, Professor Caswell directs a team of graduate students who support local community archives through paid internships funded by the Mellon Foundation.
In 2008, Professor Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of two books, “Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia,” as well as more than four dozen peer-reviewed articles.
Professor Caswell has received numerous awards for her research and teaching, including the Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholarship in 2021 for “Digital Archives, Communities and Memory,” a project in which undergraduate students completed archival work for the SAADA and the Texas After Violence Project. Caswell earned her bachelor’s degree in religion from Columbia University; her master of theological studies in world religions focusing on South Asia from Harvard University; her master of library and information science from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and her Ph.D. from the School of Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Along with Shalom Staub, assistant dean and executive director of the Center for Community Engagement, Professor Caswell will co-chair and convene a new network of Community Engagement Advisors who will help identify, support and coordinate engagement activities within their schools and divisions and across campus, including SEIS Associate Dean of Public Engagement Annamarie Francois, and UCLA IS alumna May Hong HaDuong, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.