“There is always a before and an after”: documentation, archives and the global refugee crisis

The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives and the Department of Legal Studies cordially invite you to the public lecture by

Anne J. Gilliland

(University of California Los Angeles)

“There is always a before and an after”: documentation, archives and the global refugee crisis

Thursday, November 17, 2016 | 5 PM

Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives | 1051 Budapest, Arany János utca 32.

Of all the information and memory professions, the archival field is the one that is most integrally responsible for the long-term preservation of and access to records and other forms of documentation, which are especially instrumental in the lives of people who have found themselves forced to leave their homes and homelands because of oppression, expulsion, war, natural disaster or economic exigency. This lecture will contemplate several questions:

How well do official recordkeeping and archival processes witness and account for the actions and interests of refugees and other migrants?

What are the relationships between organizational and personal and family records that should be supported in the contexts of destruction, displacement and diaspora?

How are refugees and migrants using mobile phones and social media for information and documentary purposes?What official, personal, family and other records do they need and under what circumstances might these be deemed "regular" or "irregular" in form or deployment?

What steps could the archival profession take to better support the records needs of refugees and migrants and make a more proactive contribution to the global refugee crisis?

Dr. Anne J. Gilliland is Professor and Director of the Archival Studies specialization in the Department of Information Studies, Director of the Center for Information as Evidence, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also the director of the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI), a global collaborative effort amongst academic institutions that seeks to promote state-of-the-art in scholarship in archival studies, broadly conceived, as well as to encourage curricular and pedagogical innovation in archival and recordkeeping education locally and worldwide.

Reception to follow | RSVP to szilagyc@ceu.edu