U of A Professor Receives $1M to Train Graduate Students in Community Archives
— Tucson, AZ —
Jamie A. Lee, associate dean for faculty affairs and associate professor in the College of Information Science, has devoted their career to making the gathering, telling and sharing of lived and living histories more inclusive and just. Lee and colleagues from nine other universities—Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS)—were recently awarded $6.15M from the Mellon Foundation to empower a new generation of archivists to join their work to change archival studies pedagogy by centering community archives as rich sites for learning.
The University of Arizona’s Critical Archives and Curation Collaborative (co/lab) received $1 million to fund internships at five local community archives, of which three have been selected: the Dunbar Pavilion African American Arts & Culture Center; Los Descendientes de Tucson, the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum at the Sosa-Carrillo House; and the Arizona Queer Archives.
Lee says this project is designed to be mutually beneficial: “Community archives will benefit from the resources provided by the foundation and university but also share their community knowledges, expertise, and histories. InfoSci students will gain invaluable experience in community-centered archiving practices. The goal is for students to be at the table with the community and see how community archives are developed, made accessible, and used for outreach. It's an opportunity to witness firsthand how the process evolves when the community is engaged.”
By offering paid internships, the FOCAS Project makes it possible for students, many from historically underrepresented communities, to gain professional experience while providing community archives with much-needed support. It follows in the footsteps of UCLA’s Community Archives Lab, which placed 42 second-year MA students with community archives in Southern California over six years, creating a pipeline of professional archivists—many of whom were later hired by their internship sites.
A team led by Lee and U of A colleague Berlin Loa, Associate Professor in the College of Information Science, will, importantly, map community archives and collections, relying on contributions from the FOCAS collective, community archives partners and student interns across the U.S. and Canada.