Migrating Information Studies Professor Anne Gilliland examines individual and community histories in the aftermath of human rights conflicts
BY JOANIE HARMON
38 UCLA Ed&IS FALL 2016
R
esearch on human rights archives is one of the key issues of 21st Century archival studies. The need for and impact of recordkeeping on communities that have undergone displacement, ethnic conflict, and bureaucratic violence has gained the attention of the global information community. UCLA Information Studies Professor Anne Gilliland’s research looks at the ensuing generations and how recordkeeping helps them to reconcile the turbulent past. “The development of the truth and reconciliation commissions and the tribunals for the various wars that have taken place since the Second World War and especially since the 1990s have all invoked archives and records,” she says. “They’ve also led to new documentation being created at the tribunals and in the affected countries through personal testimonies and oral history projects. However there is less work being done with those in diaspora as a result of these terrible human rights violations. “The archival and recordkeeping community collectively does not protect all citizens’ rights, at least certainly not to an equal or even equitable extent,” Gilliland argues. “We still concentrate on the interests of our own institutions and nations and have not addressed those in crisis who move across or fall between them. We fail so-called ‘non-citizens’ who fall off the archival radar: migrants, refugees, other displaced people, and the undocumented.” Gilliland is critical of the failure of record keepers to meet the principles laid out in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Archives of 2011 “for protecting citizens’ rights, for establishing individual and collective memory, for understanding the past, and for documenting the present to guide future actions.”