Tam Rayan
Research Areas
Biography
My research investigates the tangible and intangible cultural heritage practices of communities and cultural institutions in response to diaspora, displacement, settler colonialism, and repression. Specifically, I examine how Palestinians and other diasporic cultures make sense of knowledge and information management under conditions of violence and how they mobilize their own epistemologies to counteract colonial knowledge. Through predominantly qualitative methods – including participant observation, ethnography, interviews, and discourse analysis – I examine how cultures and institutions create, organize, and use information. In doing so, my research increases the visibility of communities’ classification, preservation, and dissemination practices, and counters societal erasure, neglect, and delegitimization of marginalized histories.
At the intersection of archival studies, information studies, science & technology studies, and cultural heritage studies, my scholarship advances the field’s understanding of dispersed archives and community-centered archiving practices. My research has been published and is under review in Archival Science, Archivaria, Across the Disciplines, and Computational Humanities Research. My doctoral research has been supported by the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship ($120,000), the Rackham International Research Award, Anti-Racist Digital Research Institute Fellowship, and other internal fellowships.
Pronouns
they/them
Dissertation title
Memory as Sumud: Palestinian Epistemologies of Cultural Heritage Preservation
Dissertation abstract or description
Despite over 70 years of continuous destruction and looting of Palestinian archival material, Palestinians remain deeply committed to the preservation of their collective memory and history. The archival erasure of Palestine is well documented throughout history and anthropology, however an analysis of this research area from an explicitly archival perspective is missing. Additionally, an understanding of Palestinians’ counter-archiving efforts based on their own epistemologies of recordkeeping remains undertheorized. Through a theoretical framework of counter-archives, decoloniality, and Palestinian epistemology, this dissertation examines Ramallah as a stronghold of grassroots and non-governmental archival resistance and seeks to understand how culturally specific archiving practices work to decolonize the historical narrative.
Using archival research and semi-structured interviews conducted at four Palestinian memory institutions within the United States and the West Bank, this dissertation answers the following research question: given the large-scale destruction and repression of formal Palestinian archives under Israeli settler colonialism, how are Palestinians persevering in the decolonization and preservation of their historical narratives? The aims of this project are twofold: 1) to understand how Palestinians hailing from Ramallah preserve Ramallah’s historical narratives against the denial of return, the diasporic condition, and ongoing settler violence in the West Bank, and 2) to provide insight into what historical narratives and preservation practices constitute a decolonial archival history of Ramallah. This study contributes to ongoing discussions of how colonized groups are using their own epistemologies of recordkeeping to counteract colonial knowledge and how such epistemologies are reshaping the archival field’s conceptualization of recordkeeping.
Areas of interest
Archives and Digital Curation; Library and Information Science; Science, Technology, and Society
Honors & Awards
Anti-Racist Digital Research Institute Fellow 2024-2025
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, 2022-2026
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 2020-2021
ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellowship, 2020-2021
SSHRC CGS Master’s Program Award, 2015-2016
Education
Bachelor of Arts, Laurentian University, 2010
Master of Arts, University of Toronto, 2016
Master of Information, University of Toronto, 2020
Selected publications
Ghadeer Awwad, Tamara N. Rayan, Lavinia Dunagan and David Gamba. “Collective Memory and Narrative Cohesion: A Computational Study of Palestinian Refugee Oral Histories in Lebanon.” Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources (2025): 83–102. [Link].
Rayan, Tamara N. “Transformative provenance: Memory work in the Palestinian diaspora.” Archival Science (2024): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-024-09455-9
Rayan, Tamara N. “Archival Imperialism: Examining Israel’s Six Day War Files in the Era of ‘Decolonization.’” Across the Disciplines 18, no. 1 (Nov 2021): 108-121. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2021.18.1-2.09
Martin, Stefanie, Tamara Rayan and Moska Rokay. “45 Years Later: The First BIPOC Forum at ACA.” Off the Record, v. 36, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 16-18.
Rayan, Tamara N. "Archival Imperialism: An Analysis of Racial Hierarchy in the Six Day War Files." University of Toronto (Canada), 2020.
