A podcast about archives, community, and academic organizing across North America.
Community Archives in Focus is a podcast series created by FOCAS—Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support— a collective of faculty members representing nine academic institutions across Canada and the United States. This podcast series brings listeners into the vital work of community archival projects, unveiling the histories, voices, and expertise of communities that have often been excluded from mainstream institutions.
Hosted by FOCAS postdoctoral researchers Axelle Demus and Maria Torres, each episode features conversations with scholars, archivists, and MLIS students working on the front lines of community memory and whose work centers the needs of BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and other minoritized communities. Through this podcast, we invite listeners to join us in thinking critically about how to support, participate in, and amplify community archives as vital sites of history and memory.
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Episode 2: Skid Row Archive & Museum
FOCAS IN FOCUS Episode Two focuses on the story of the Skid Row Archive and Museum, an arts-based community archive in downtown Los Angeles. The archive documents and maps grassroots community organizing, artistic practices, and activist histories of the Skid Row neighborhood, amidst ongoing threats of displacement and gentrification. For this episode, we interviewed Henry…
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Episode 1: Archives in Crisis
The episode explores how academics, students, archivists are working together to resist erasure, and why activist archiving has never been more necessary.