FOCAS: Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support is a collective of faculty members representing nine academic institutions across Canada and the United States who are training masters of library and information science (MLIS) students to respond to the needs of community archives. Positioned at the forefront of archival education, our collaborative work will provide a model for cultivating the next generation of information workers as community archives partners and stewards; support community archives of historically underrepresented groups across North America in preserving and making accessible their important histories; and reinvent archives curriculum resources for Library and Information Science (LIS) educators across North America to better respond to the needs of BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and other minoritized communities.
Since forming FOCAS in 2022 to explore the challenges of and possibilities for a larger-scale North American effort to support paid internships at community archives, our findings have shown that any internship program focusing on community archives needs to be accompanied by significant curricular changes that decenter dominant archival paradigms and better prepare students for the realities of community-based and community-centered archival work. While MLIS programs are responding to changes in the field, these changes have been slow to occur and do not yet meet the needs of many students and faculty, especially those from historically underrepresented communities. FOCAS faculty believe that curricular transformation in tandem with practical experience at community archives can transform archival theory and practice. Positioned at the forefront of archival education, our collaborative work will provide a model for cultivating the next generation of information workers as community archives partners and stewards; support community archives of historically underrepresented groups across North America in preserving and making accessible their important histories; and reinvent archives curriculum resources for Library and Information Science (LIS) educators across North America to better respond to the needs of BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and other minoritized communities.
Members
Sumayya Ahmed, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) at the University of Chicago. Prior to this appointment, she taught as an Assistant Professor at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science and at University College London’s global campus in Doha, Qatar. Her published research has focused on documentary heritage, societal provenance, archival history, oral history, and the politics of cultural heritage preservation in North Africa and the region called the Middle East. She has also published on racism in the university and responses to calls for social justice in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum(GLAM) workplaces.
Gracen Brilmyer PhD (they/them) is a disabled researcher working at the intersection of feminist disability studies and archival studies. Their work investigates the erasure of disabled people in archives primarily within the history of natural history museums and colonial histories as well as how disabled people experience themselves in archival material. They are an assistant professor at McGill University’s School of Information Studies and the director of the Disability Archives Lab, which hosts multi-disciplinary projects that center the politics of disability, how disabled people are affected by archives, and how to imagine archival futures that are centered around disabled desires. Their writing on disability history, archival methodologies, and the history of science has been featured in publications such as The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, First Monday, and Archival Science. For more: DisabilityArchivesLab.com
Michelle Caswell, PhD, (she/her), is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where so co-directs the UCLA Community Archives Lab (https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/). At UCLA, she was recently appointed as Executive Vice Chancellor/ Provost’s Special Advisor on Community-Engaged Scholarship. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saada.org), an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than four dozen peer-reviewed articles.
Marika Cifor (she/her), PhD, is associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington where she also holds an adjunct appointment in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. An expert in archives and digital studies, she is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and numerous articles in archival studies, gender and sexuality studies, digital humanities, and critical information studies. She has been engaged with community archives as a researcher and practitioner for over fifteen years, including those focused on HIV/AIDS and on LGBTQIA+ communities and as a long-term member of the editorial board of the Homosaurus. Cifor is the recipient of an early career award from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.
Thuy Vo Dang, PhD (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Information Studies and Asian American Studies and an oral historian at the University of California, Los Angeles where she co-directs the UCLA Community Archives Lab. Formerly the Curator for the University of California, Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive and inaugural director of Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project, Thuy’s work centers voices on the margins of history. She is coauthor of A People’s Guide to Orange County (University of California Press, 2022) and Vietnamese in Orange County (Arcadia Publishing, 2015) and serves as a board member for Arts Orange County and the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association.
Jennifer Douglas (she/her), PhD, is Associate Professor in the Master of Archival Studies program in the School of Information at the University of British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people. She teaches courses on personal and community archives and arrangement and description. Her research, which has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada, has focused on personal and community archives creation and representation, with particular emphases on the emotional dimensions of recordkeeping, on grief and recordkeeping and on person-centred recordkeeping. She is co-editor with Jessica Lapp, Mya Ballin and Sadaf Ahmadbeigi of a special issue of Archivaria on person-centred archival theory and praxis. She is currently co-lead with Dr. Henry Yu of the Creating Better Asian Canadian Community Engaged Research Research Excellence Cluster at UBC.
Axelle Demus (they/them), PhD, is the Community Archives & Accessibility Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University’s School of Information Studies. As part of their appointment, they are developing and supporting a local community archives internship program while conducting interdisciplinary research focused on disability and accessibility across community archives sites. Axelle’s research draws from the fields of queer studies, media studies, disability studies, and critical archival theory to consider processes of “queer access mobilization” through which queer individuals and groups mobilize analog and digital technologies to increase access to media and information, as well as access to social, cultural, and/or political networks. They are currently working on a book project which is based on their dissertation and which traces the history of LGBTQ2+ community television programs in Canada from the 1970s to the 2000s. Axelle is also invested in creative methodologies that help make vulnerable archival material available to classrooms and underrepresented communities, and has been developing open-access pedagogical guides as the educational co-lead for the Archive/Counter-Archive project (counterarchive.ca) that activate marginalized audiovisual collections held at various archival sites and artist-run centres across Canada. For more: axelledemus.com.
Anthony W. Dunbar (Tony), PhD (cis male hetero) is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at Dominican University, where he also serves as the iSchool’s Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Coordinator. His research builds on the racial and social justice frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Tony’s current efforts focus on developing pedagogy, scholarship, and activism to expand the CRT framework into a platform specific for Information Studies, namely Critical Race information Theory (CRiT). He is the initiator and Global Lead for the Critical Race Theory collective (CRTc), a community of international, interdisciplinary, and intersectional scholar-activists who are committed to cultivating knowledge and information across borders (in all their forms). He is the co convener for the Association for Library and Information Science Educator’s (ALISE) Innovative Pedagogy Special Interest Group and is the lead co-chair for the ALISE 2025 annual conference. Dr Dunbar serves on the Editorial Boards for the peer-reviewed journals, The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI) and Education For Information along with sitting on the executive board of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.
Vanessa Irvin is an associate professor with the Master of Library Science Program at East Carolina University (USA). Dr. Irvin has authored three books, over 60 peer-reviewed publications and presentations, and has been an invited speaker to over 30 panels and events. She has also led grant-funded research projects exploring how heritage-based knowledge systems impact information-seeking behaviors and literacy practices in daily life. Irvin’s work investigates libraries as collaborative communities for literacy justice for diverse and local/Indigenous populations. DrV is equally interested in the social informatics of informal learning and the evolution of librarian professional practices with reference services and emerging technologies. Irvin serves as Co-Editor of the open-access peer-reviewed journal, The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI), where she manages an editorial team of 20 librarians and an editorial board of 35 LIS scholars worldwide. For 2024-2025, Dr. Irvin will be President of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE).
Jamie A. Lee, PhD (they/she) is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Associate Professor of Digital Culture, Information, and Society in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona, where they co-founded and direct the Critical Archives & Curation Collaborative, co/lab; the Arizona Queer Archives, and the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab, which communicates multimodal productions research to a broader public as engaged research and, importantly, as a vehicle for social justice. Their book Producing the Archival Body (Routledge, 2021) interrogates how power circulates in archival contexts and builds critical understandings of how archives influence and shape productions of embodied knowledge. Lee was awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Early Career Grant to inquire into the politics of description in community-based archives and also the prestigious Agnese Nelms Haury Program for Environment and Social Justice Faculty Fellowship and the Digital Borderlands Grant from the UA Libraries through Mellon Foundation to develop their Digital Humanities project, secrets of the agave | a Climate Justice Storytelling Project. (www.thestorytellinglab.io)
Berlin Loa is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona College of Information Science. She also manages the Knowledge River Program, a cohort-based learning community which fosters work in information science from the perspectives of historically marginalized people to build skills in cultural literacy and awareness in information services to these communities. Her work encompasses the socio-cultural and technological aspects of preservation informed by critical cultural studies, and her areas of focus include place as cultural memory, knowledge networks in communities of practice, and community-driven cultural heritage preservation.
James Lowry (he/him) is Professor and Chair of the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York. He is the Ellen Libretto and Adam Conrad Endowed Chair in Information Studies, and the founder and director of the Archival Technologies Lab. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London and the University of Liverpool, where he was co-director of the Centre for Archive Studies, following a career in archives. His research is concerned with information and governance, particularly in colonial, post-colonial and diasporic contexts. His current projects include Displacements and Diasporas, exploring the technical and theoretical problems connected with displaced archives. His recent publications include Disputed Archival Heritage (Routledge, 2022), an edited anthology that won the Society of American Archivists’ Waldo Gifford Leland Award for “writing of superior excellence and usefulness in the field of archival history, theory or practice”. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese. James is convenor of Archival Discourses, an international research network that fosters critical enquiry into the intellectual history of archival science, and with Dr. Sumayya Ahmed, he co-edits the Routledge Studies in Archives book series.
Lindsay Kistler Mattock (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Library Science at East Carolina University. Her work focuses on the archival practices of non-institutional archival spaces, such as media collectives and community archives. Her ongoing digital project, Mapping the Independent Media Community builds from archival resources and traces the historical social networks emerging between independent film and video makers, distributors, media arts centers, and cultural heritage institutions to understand how the historical conditions of the independent and avant-garde have influenced contemporary archival praxis.
Temi Odumosu (she/her) is Assistant Professor and a curator in the Information School at the University of Washington. A trained art historian, she is an interdisciplinary scholar and curator focused on visual culture, technology and artistic practice, and digital archives. Her work examines the visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, and how unfinished colonial histories and their inequalities haunt archives, data, and the uses of information and technology design as manifest in areas including postmemorial art and performance and image ethics and politics of cultural heritage digitization. Overall, she is focused on the ways art and archives can mediate social transformation and healing. Odumosu is author of the award-winning, Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017) as well as art essays, journal articles, and chapters in art, art history, digital studies, and Black studies. She has curated major exhibitions in Sweden, Denmark, the UK and US.
Vanessa Reyes (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at East Carolina University Library Science Program. Dr. Reyes’ credentials include a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College, and an M.S. in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University. She has over 15 years of practical experience, working across various cultural and information institutions. Dr. Reyes’ research explores the emerging field of personal information management (PIM). Her studies focus on how users organize, manage, and preserve digital information, contributing to digital heritage preservation. Her research also addresses the need for personal information tools that support users as they age. Dr. Reyes is a co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI), reflecting her dedication to international scholarship.
Cecilia Salvatore
Tonia Sutherland
Maria Torres is a postdoctoral research fellow in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. Their dissertation and current book project offer an alternate history of forensics grounded in direct action, technological disobedience and contestational biology in the context of forced disappearance in Mexico. Drawing on long-term collaboration with Buscadora searching groups, human rights advocators and local scientists, Maria documents how grassroots and counter-forensic practices open a space to attend to overlapping systems of political and environmental violence in a landscape of neoliberal dispossession. Their research is embedded in a commitment to social engagement, which they have pursued through community-based research, collaborative writing, multimedia art projects and activist work in both the field and the classroom. María holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the inter-institutional program offered jointly by Universidad Complutense, Autonomous University, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofìa. Their key research questions have remained constant throughout this multidisciplinary trajectory and relate to the ethics and politics of cultural representations of science and technology, with a particular emphasis on their intersections with social movements and feminist materialisms in Latin America.
Stacey Wedlake (she/her) is a Research Scientist with the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the University of Washington Information School. Her research focuses on the role of intermediaries (public libraries, community organizations, and governments) in digital equity efforts. She has a particular interest in how these groups can best support individual and community digital literacy goals. More recently, as part of the National Science Foundation-funded project, Co-designing for Trust, she has begun to explore how digital literacy resources can be better designed as community-oriented solutions to misinformation.
Dee Winn (she/her) is the MLIS Program Manager for the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the Internship Coordinator for the FOCAS Program. Her primary research interest is the lack of racial and ethnic diversity among academic librarians. Her most recently published works are two book chapters: Why Are You Brown? Racial Microaggressions in Canadian Academic Libraries (2022) In: Dismantling Constructs of Whiteness in Higher Education: Narratives of Resistance from the Academy. Eds: T.Y. Neely and M. Martinez. Routledge and MLIS Program Manager. (forthcoming, 2025) In: Career Options in Library and Information Services: First-Hand Accounts from Working Professionals. Editor: Priscilla K. Shontz. Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited.