Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI): UMSI Research Roundup

The 2026 Archival Education and Research Initiative will take place July 20-24 in Vancouver, BC. UMSI researchers will be presenting work on archival education, practice and emerging issues across the field. Check out their presentations below. 

Publications

Archival Stewardship in the Armenian Community: Shaping Use Through Hospitality and Care

Nazelie Doghramadjian 

What are the contributive fingerprints of Armenians in academic archival collections? Especially in the U.S., there are clear efforts in the Armenian community to archive personal papers, photographs, oral histories, and various personal and community records to make up for erasure and dispersion post-genocide, and to document experiences in the diaspora. When these records are donated to and accessioned by academic institutions, what community fingerprints remain? How can stewardship in the Armenian community influence our field’s definition of archival stewardship and its materialization in special collections? This short paper is an early chapter of the dissertation findings after interviewing academic archival professionals (special collections archivists, field archivists, curators, conservationists) who work with Armenian collections at their institutions. These interviews are accompanied by the relevant archival research at university special collections centers (i.e., UCLA, USC, UC Davis, University of Michigan), and an in-depth ethnographic study with a family archivist in southeast Michigan who is preparing personal papers for donation to the Special Collections Research Institute at the University of Michigan. After qualitative coding of interview transcripts, archival site visit fieldnotes, and ethnographic memos, this short paper outlines findings on personal archival practices of Armenians in the U.S., and their impact on academic archives and special collections. Larger themes tackled through this research and analysis include epistemic injustice in archives and archival creation, and who is seen as a ‘knower’ in archives (community and academic/institutional). Academic archives are traditionally defined as knowledge institutions, creating an epistemic separation from community knowledge production. However, it is clear that the Armenian community materially helps shape historical evidence; this short paper provides a snapshot of this among the academic institutions in the U.S. where Armenian collections are primarily held.

Platformed Death on Legacy.com: Digital Obituaries and How We Remember in the Age of LLMs

Kevin Zheng, Lavinia Dunagan, Nazelie Doghramadjian 

Legacy.com has grown significantly in size since its launch in 1998, now hosting over 40 million digital obituaries in the United States and mediating transactions between grieving families, 10,000 funeral homes, and 3,200 local newspapers. Through its central role in the American death industry, the platform has renegotiated how we produce and disseminate online memorials—simultaneously financializing the textual artifacts of remembrance and selling promises of permanence to mourners. In this short paper, we ask: What are the implications of Legacy’s widespread usage for posthumous memory practices in an age of platform instability and LLMs? Obituaries are a vehicle for communal remembrance and genealogical research, as well as representations of local value systems. Our study highlights the importance of personal archives and the risks of ceding stewardship over this infrastructure to corporate entities. 

To make sense of Legacy as a real and imagined archive, we develop a method of randomly sampling obituaries and generate a dataset of over 100,000 digital obituaries published to the platform. We find that 39% of obituaries published in 2025 were, in part or in whole, generated with Legacy’s ObitWriter LLM, up from only 4% in 2020. Text analysis reveals that ObitWriter-generated obituaries are more likely to feature phrases that sell the platform’s revenue-generating features (“plant a tree”, “floral store”) compared to non-ObitWriter obituaries, which are more likely to feature words that signify familial or community relationships (“beloved wife”, “church”). In describing how people use an existing memorial platform, we consider the possibility of a dignified digital death and a future in which our digital infrastructures reflect archival values. When dying is the one thing guaranteed in life, is this how we should be remembering our loved ones?

Sentirpensar as a Site of Dialogue in the Andean Diaspora

Yvette Ramirez 

This paper explores how sentirpensar, an ontological articulation that integrates feeling and thinking, can serve as a framework for rethinking archival practices within Indigenous and Indigenous-descendant Latinx diasporas. It argues that dominant Western notions of the archive, rooted in universalist thinking, often fail to account for localized systems of memory and knowledge. Viewing recordkeeping through an ontological lens reveals relationships that include both human and non-human beings, as well as processes of becoming through memory. This study examines the recordkeeping practices of dancers from the highland Bolivian diaspora in the United States, focusing on the ontologies, or stories, expressed through records created in conjunction with dance. It asks: (1) What can archival initiatives seeking to preserve Andean dance traditions gain from adopting an ontological approach to recordkeeping? (2) How might a pluriversal understanding of memory open space for asserting the agency of Andean and other resisting Latinx Indigenous diasporas in the United States? This research suggests that the diaspora’s constant flux and its resistance to colonial impositions can generate new forms of consciousness. 

Through narrative inquiry & reflexive methodologies, this study, also my dissertation project, will examine how relationships within dance records can be revealed through storytelling and archival description exercises. For diasporas, dance expands stylistic and rhythmic possibilities, creating room for remixing and for challenging traditions that have reinforced gender marginalization. Engaging with region-specific, ontological dimensions of knowledge production can help information professionals, memory workers, and archivists better support practices that reflect localized value systems, relationships, and spatial-temporal boundaries represented in records. By rethinking archival structures, often shaped by ideals of “efficiency” and a settler colonial logic that insists: “I have the right to know, to access, and to possess.” This research aims to offer, in a moment defined by uncertainty, an act of renewal.

Reparative Description of Indige-Mimetic Domination

Tonsing Suanmuanlian

The significance of this paper lies in two reasons. It interrogates information infrastructures, especially how archival institutions obscure the social and epistemic consequences they reproduce, and demands that they take accountability. Taking examples from the case of an ethnic conflict that resulted in over 60,000 displacements, 350 killed, and 5,000 houses destroyed in Manipur, India, this paper explores how two Indigenous groups, Meitei and Kuki, re-mobilize colonial archives (housed in the National Archives of the UK and Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum) through social media to reassert power over other Indigenous groups called the Zomi. To address the complex Indigenous internal conflicts rooted in colonial structures, it offers a set of principles for reparative description. First, reparative description must prioritize working directly with dominated Indigenous groups to document evidence of domination by other Indigenous groups through archives, including the harm it leads to at the local level, such as ethnic violence and displacement. Second, based on this evidence, these communities should actively participate in analyzing archival descriptions to identify harmful data schemes, metadata, or terminologies, and examine how these practices have been or could be weaponized directly or indirectly. The next step is to correct these harmful practices by revising subject headings, keywords, and classification schemes, while incorporating culturally grounded, community-verified metadata and terminologies to ensure that archival descriptions are not used against the dominated Indigenous groups. Finally, it advocates that archival institutions work to prevent the algorithmic and institutional weaponization of archival data to dominate other Indigenous groups. The paper presents this set of principles for reparative description: sensitive, timely, and crucial.

Panels

Engaging the Community: Translocal Conversations on Archival Practice

Moska Rokay, Tamara Rayan, Stefanie Martin, Emily Faubert

This panel brings together 4 practitioner-scholars engaging with different community contexts to examine how archival practices can better reflect the lived realities, priorities and cultural logics of the communities they serve. By placing our distinct projects in conversation, this panel highlights both the common threads and the complexities of working in each of our respective communities. 

Workshops

Intentional Creation: Reflecting on our Agency through Zine-Making

Beck Mallwitz, Nazelie Doghramadjian

At once, this workshop looks forward and back in time. We consider the future of personal and community archiving amidst the rise of fickle technology, generative AI for text and image generation, and constant pushes for content rather than intentional preservation and creation. For instance: the ouroboros of “AI slop”—training its models on previously generated “content”—produces less and less meaning. In a time of anti-intellectualism and low media literacy, this feels particularly dangerous. We look to the past for advice, drawing from scrappy revolutionary and resistance movements of the last several decades. They emphasized the importance of community, independent thought, artistic expression, and personal reflection. This workshop aims to take a small step towards resisting the oncoming waves of such technologies forced upon us by prioritizing and privileging our own creativity and creation. We believe information creation is an expression of identity and personal knowledge, reflecting an individual’s capacity as a knower. In this workshop, we will create zines, pamphlets, and other ephemera, with guiding prompts such as: “What is something about the present day you would like to be preserved?”“What is one thing you wish people knew more about archives?” and “How might we engage the public with approachable guides to little-known subcultural art? (i.e., The Transfeminine Review).” We open the workshop with frameworks derived from our own dissertations, then invite the audience for an in-depth discussion of the practice of creation and how we might incorporate it into our daily lives (as well as our classrooms and workplaces). We will incorporate recommendations on affect in creating information, acknowledging and moving with our feelings, particularly in a time that urges dissociation from reality and our bodies. This workshop aims to be a reflective meditation on forward and backward thinking in a time when we are encouraged not to think at all and let technology do it for us. We hope participants walk away with both tangible and emotional artifacts from this workshop.

Plenaries

Looking Back to Move Forward

Anne Gilliland, Beth Yakel, Jeanette Bastian, Joanne Evans, Michelle Caswell

Looking Back to Move Forward is an opportunity to hear from some of AERI’s founders who aimed to build the archival studies discipline in significant ways as well as next generation scholars who have continued this work locally and internationally. Panelists include Anne Gilliland, Beth Yakel, Jeannette Bastian, Joanne Evans, and Michelle Caswell.

Looking Ahead in Our Field with Recent PhD Graduates

Itza Carbajal, Tamara Rayan, Anna Robinson-Sweet

This PhD Day plenary invites three recent archives PhD graduates for a roundtable that looks to the future of our rapidly changing field. Drs. Itza Carbajal, Tamara (Tam) Rayan, and Anna Robinson-Sweet, in conversation with one another, will discuss their experiences as archival scholars in information science programs that have become increasingly data-driven and in job markets that reflect the same. This next generation of AERI scholars will tackle themes relevant to both current graduate students and their mentors alike. How are we conducting archival research at such a critical time, or crafting research questions that resonate with and matter to our communities? This plenary focuses on these three recent graduates’ vision for the field and how they have navigated their own research and career trajectories. At a conference that also highlights the work of our current PhDs, this plenary amplifies the voices of new archival scholars that we’ll be hearing from for many years to come. 

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