Antiviolence and Marginalized Communities: Knowledge Creation, Community Mobilization, and Social Justice through a Participatory Archiving Approach

The Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project (DAMC), at the University of Manitoba, is an interdisciplinary collaboration to design and develop three separate but related digital archives using a participatory archiving approach with stakeholder community groups. Working titles for these collections are the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database (MMIWD), the Sex Work Database (SWD), and the Post-Apology Residential School Database (PARSD). This article discusses research and development from the project’s inception in 2012 through the end of 2014, reflecting on the practical and theoretical considerations that arise for researchers and practitioners in the information science professions as a result of engaging with anticolonial and antiviolence feminist methodologies. These methodological perspectives place the experiences and knowledge of Indigenous and sex worker communities at the center of decolonizing processes, foregrounding the need for archival processes that not only captures but also uses these knowledge(s) as the organizational scaffolding upon which to build socially just and representative archives for specific marginalized communities. Using examples drawn from all three archives, this article demonstrates how the goals, intentions, and knowledges of marginalized communities might be built into digital archives projects through a participatory archiving approach. This discussion is followed by an examination of how fostering and maintaining respectful relationships between all members involved with DAMC collaborations is fundamentally connected to both participatory archiving processes and broader social justice objectives.