The Society of American Archivists Human Rights Archives’ Roundtable has started a new interview series called “Five Questions for…” This week, HRDI Archivist T-Kay Sangwand was featured as part of the series – see her interview with the roundtable here.
Also be sure to check out the series’ inaugural post, featuring an interview with Verne Harris, Head of Memory Programming at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory, which is the first interview in the Five Questions series.
The Human Rights Documentation Initiative is pleased to announce the launch of the online video archive from Rethinking Power & Resistance: Gender and Human Rights from Texas to the Transnational Americas, an interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Women and Gender Studies, as part of the Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative.
Rethinking Power and Resistance brought activists, organizers and scholars together to discuss issues relevant to activism and community organizing, such as; Arts as Advocacy, Pedagogies of Alliance and Resisting Criminalization. The video archive, produced with the assistance of videographer Andrea Zarate, contains footage of several panel discussions, a radio segment aired on KOOP 91.7 fm’s progressive news program, People United, and a post-conference promotional video. A few highlights from the collection include:
-Women in Hip-Hop Roundtable, featuring artist TooFly and hip-hop artists Yoli Zapata, DJ Trinity, Invincible, and Lah Tere. The Women in Hip-Hop roundtable features activist women participating in an open discussion about how race, sexuality, and gender have intersected to impact and shape their art, in addition to personal stories of how they got involved in art and music and their current activist projects.
-Making a Difference discussion with Miss Major, director of the Transgender Intersex Justice Project. Miss Major is a powerful activist and transgender elder working for transgender and intersex visibility and rights, especially in the prison system. Miss Major’s talk highlights the oppression faced by transgender women in the Prison System, many of whom are housed according to physical sex instead of of gender identity, which makes them vulnerable to harassment, sexual assault, and exploitation at the hands of other inmates. Miss Major’s talk is an open, frank discussion of the issues faced by transgender and intersex people both in and outside of the prison industrial complex, espousing a need to view transgender rights as part of the global human rights framework, not as a niche or special interest group.
-Rethinking Power and Resistance Promotional video, featuring interviews from conference organizers and attendees, as well as footage from Mama Said Knock You Out 2, a benefit concert for Mamas of Color Rising. This follow-up video to the conference contains interviews with conference participants, organizers and speakers as well as impressions of the closing concert, Mama Said Knock You Out 2.
Part of the power present in this conference is the participants’ ability to continually share their work and activism through the online video archive. To view additional videos from the conference, visit the new Rethinking Power and Resistance Conference page at the HRDI Collections website, and the Finding Aid at the Texas Archival Repository online.
To view photos from Mama Said Knock You Out 2, and read TooFly’s writing about her experience at the conference and creating live art during the concert, check out her blog post covering the event.
For those present in Austin, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Human Rights Documentation Initiative will be hosting a panel discussion celebrating the launch of the new video archive: https://www.facebook.com/events/158825117618238
(cross-posted from Tex Libris)
I see pictures of people, rising up
pictures of people, falling down
I see pictures of people
they’re standing on their heads, they’re ready
they’re looking out, look out!
they’re watching out, watch out!
“This is the Picture” from Peter Gabriel’s So
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The Libraries efforts in the field of human rights continue to flourish.
The Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) has announced a new partnership with human rights video advocacy organization WITNESS to preserve and provide access to raw video footage of human rights abuses and video productions collected from the organization’s partners.
WITNESS was co-founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel with Human Rights First and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation to provide support to grassroots advocacy through the use of video as an integrated tool in human rights campaigns.
This is the sixth partnership in which the HRDI has become involved. Other projects include work with the the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda, the Guatemalan National Police Archive, theTexas After Violence Project, Free Burma Rangers and the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.
As seen by the recent successes and widespread use of video by citizen journalists in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the growth of civic media to fight injustice will continue apace.
You can see the full press release on the new collaboration here.
And here’s video of the Ted Talk where Gabriel explains the concept of WITNESS:
A human rights project established at the University of Texas Libraries has announced a collaborative effort with an international organization that focuses on video documentation of human rights violations.
The Libraries’ Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) will expand its collection with source materials provided by human rights organization WITNESS to guarantee long-term preservation of and expanded access to raw footage and video productions created by the organization and its partners.
Now marking its 20th anniversary, WITNESS shows its commitment to supporting ongoing human rights change by seeking strategic partnerships with diverse stakeholders who can help meet the growing needs of human rights activists using video to expose injustice.
“WITNESS is thrilled to be working with the University of Texas Libraries,” says Grace Lile, WITNESS’ Director of Operations and Archives. “This partnership will help ensure the long-term preservation of unique human rights video from grassroots human rights defenders. Equally important, it will make this primary source material much more widely accessible for study, research and reflection.”
WITNESS was co-founded in 1992 by musician and human rights advocate Peter Gabriel, Human Rights First, and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation for the purpose of empowering front line human rights advocates in the use of video to document human rights abuses across the globe. Since then, WITNESS has partnered with more than 300 human rights groups in over 80 countries, trained over 3,000 human rights defenders, developed widely-used training materials and tools, and supported the inclusion of video in more than 100 campaigns, increasing their visibility and impact.
The WITNESS Media Archive was founded in 2004 and is today the repository for over 5000 hours of video from over 80 countries. The archive has been a leader in developing practices and models for the archiving of video documentation in a human rights context, and in recognizing the importance of archives to the promotion and defense of human rights.
“The HRDI holds a deep respect for WITNESS’ work around human rights video agency, advocacy and archiving, so it’s truly an honor to play a pivotal role in the preservation of and access to the powerful human rights narratives that WITNESS and its partners have brought to the fore of public awareness over the past twenty years,” says HRDI archivist T-Kay Sangwand. “The collections that we have received so far complement the HRDI’s existing holdings, particularly on armed conflict and genocide in Central America and Africa.“
The collaboration with WITNESS is the sixth such by the HRDI since its launch in 2008. Previous work includes the project’s founding partnership with the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda to archive and provide access to documents of the 1994 genocide in that country, as well as a recently publicized project to undertake similar work for the Guatemalan National Police Archive, a cache of records including documentation of torture, disappearances and other human rights abuses from the period of authoritarian rule in that country. The HRDI also collaborates with the Texas After Violence Project, Free Burma Rangers and the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.
“As a large research library with a robust digital preservation infrastructure, the University of Texas Libraries is well equipped to ensure the long-term preservation of and access to WITNESS’s rich material,” continues Sangwand. “This not only helps fulfill the university’s mission to provide the resources our faculty and students need for teaching and scholarship, but also enables the public, particularly the communities documented in the archive, to easily access the materials.”
Examples of materials from the WITNESS archive:
For further information, or to learn more about accessing the collections, please contact either T-Kay Sangwand from HRDI at sangwand@austin.utexas.edu or Yvonne Ng from WITNESS at 718.783.2000,yvonne@witness.org.
About the Human Rights Documentation Archive
The University of Texas Libraries established the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) at the University of Texas at Austin with a generous grant from the Bridgeway Foundation in 2008. Working with activists, scholars, and organizations to identify electronic and analog resources that are particularly vulnerable to loss, the HRDI aims to preserve the most fragile records of human rights struggles worldwide, promote the security and use of human rights archival materials and further human rights research and advocacy around the world. lib.utexas.edu/hrdi
About WITNESS
WITNESS is the global pioneer in the use of video to expose human rights abuses. We empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change. Founded in 1992, WITNESS has partnered with more than 300 human rights groups in over 80 countries, trained over 3,000 human rights defenders, developed widely-used training materials and tools, and supported the inclusion of video in more than 100 campaigns, increasing their visibility and impact. Videos made by WITNESS and our partners have told dozens of critical human rights stories, and have galvanized grassroots communities, judges, activists, media and decision-makers at local, national and international levels to action. www.witness.org
Photo: “Memory and Documentation” sign from Ibuka archive, Rwanda. Taken on 2009 HRDI trip.
(Cross-posted at Tex Libris)
In September, UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative representatives Christian Kelleher and T-Kay Sangwand traveled to Columbia University to participate in an advisory group meeting for theCenter for Research Libraries (CRL) MacArthur Foundation funded project, Human Rights Electronic Evidence Study. The Human Rights Electronic Evidence Study aims to understand the human rights documentation landscape – technologies, documentation creators and end users – and to identify tools and practices for improving documentation’s uses for advocacy and scholarship.
In addition to Kelleher and Sangwand, the advisory group consisted of librarians and archivists from Columbia University, Duke University and human rights organization, WITNESS, as well as practicing lawyers and professors from the University of Texas School of Law. During this day-long meeting, the group discussed how human rights documentation is used from the point of creation by an organization/activist to how it ends up in an archive for educational purposes and a courtroom for legal purposes. Based on their experience of establishing digital preservation partnerships with organizations that create human right documentation, Kelleher and Sangwand shared some of the challenges that can prevent such documentation from ever arriving to the archive (namely, trust and ownership disputes) as well as the HRDI’s approach to overcoming this challenge – the use of the post custodial archival model that allows organizations to maintain physical and intellectual ownership of their materials while depositing digital copies at UT for long-term preservation. Through presentations by legal experts (including the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice Co-Director, Dan Brinks) on how human rights documentation may be used in U.S. and international courts, the HRDI was proud to learn that its metadata and preservation standards meet and even surpass the general recommended criteria for documentation authentication in a court of law.
The meeting’s discussion on the creation, preservation, and use of human rights documentation will be synthesized with the study’s findings in CRL’s final report due out in late 2011/early 2012.
