Browsing by Author "Douglas, Jennifer"

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    “It Feels Like a Life’s Work” : Recordkeeping as an Act of Love
    (2021-06-16) Douglas, Jennifer; Alisauskas, Alexandra
    By considering a set of in-depth interviews with eight bereaved mothers, this article seeks to explore ideas about what records are and what they do. Working to centre the voices and experiences of the bereaved mothers, the article first discusses some of the objects, events, places, and bodily traces they identified that function as records. It next considers the roles records and recordkeeping played for the parents interviewed, identifying four types of records work: proving life and love, parenting, continuing a relationship, and imagining. Records and recordkeeping are shown to be instrumental in the ongoing processing of traumatic loss as well as in the significant work of ensuring a life has meaning and is acknowledged. Finally, the interviews with parents also showed how deeply imbricated are love and grief as emotions and as motivations for recordkeeping, and the article ends by articulating a call for archivists to learn to “look with love.”
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    “Treat Them with the Reverence of Archivists” : Records Work, Grief Work, and Relationship Work in the Archives
    (Association of Canadian Archivists, 2019-11) Douglas, Jennifer; Alisauskas, Alexandra; Mordell, Devon
    In this article, we take up Geoff Wexler and Linda Long’s call to explore the ways in which records and recordkeeping are “bound up” in experiences of loss and grieving. Drawing on theoretical and clinical literature on bereavement, we introduce the concept of grief work and investigate some ways in which grief work can be performed through the creation, use, organization, and preservation of records. We illustrate our study of records work as grief work with examples from the Hamilton Family Fonds at the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, the Sylvia Plath collections at Smith College and Indiana University, and the Lara Gilbert Fonds at the University of Victoria Archives. Finally, we suggest some impacts – especially the ethical impacts – a grief work perspective might have on the ongoing development of archival theory and methodology. This article lays the conceptual groundwork for a larger, ongoing study on recordkeeping, grief work, and the concept of archival care.