Towards a Human Right in Recordkeeping and Archives

Carbone, Kathy; Gilliland, Anne; Lewis, Antonina; Rolan, Gregory

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_23

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…And 'it cannot enforce better behaviour by bad actors or deal with those who simply do not care'. 8 In the OOHC sector, and as mirrored in aged and disability care, each successive inquiry reports -from the Bringing Them Home (1997) to the Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee on Forgotten Australians (2004), and the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017), amongst many others -bear witness to devastating failures of duty of care, and the impact of poor, negligent or absent recordkeeping practices and lack of access to records in this context. 9 Combined with ethics of care, rights-based frameworks are designed to be incorporated in legislation and policy development and offer an infrastructure to offset imbalances of power.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Transformative Practice in Out of Home Care: Chartering Rights in Recordkeeping

Golding

McKemmish

Reed

2021

Archives and Manuscripts

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The CLAN Rights Charter asserts rights in records for Care leavers who were taken from their homes and families and communities, and placed in orphanages, children 's Homes, foster Care and other forms of institutions. The Australian Charter of Lifelong Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out of Home Care is a response to the critical, largely unmet recordkeeping and archival needs of both children and young people in Care today, and Care leavers, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, young people and their families, and Stolen Generations. It focuses on their lifelong and diverse recordkeeping needs. The recordkeeping rights specified in both Charters are essential enablers for the exercise of human rights, including participatory, identity, memory and accountability rights. They provide a rights-based foundation for addressing the continuing recordkeeping failures, the major gaps in the archival record, and the weaponisation of data and records that plague the Care sector. In this article, the authors discuss the research and advocacy contexts of the two interrelated Charters, their mapping of the Charters aimed at cross-validation and identification of gaps. They then explore the challenge of translating the Charters into transformative practice, advocating for their adoption and developing guidelines for their implementation. KeywordsRights Charters in Childhood Recordkeeping; Out of Home Care Australia; Participatory recordkeeping; Children and young people in Care; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people in Care; Care Leavers and Stolen Generations essential for expert advice to be available to anyone wishing to refuse to participate given the potential unforeseen risk of harm, e.g. because evidence not available for redress. vi Note: implementing access rights may involve balancing competing rights in a participatory process. vii As a result of the findings of a comparative research study and mappings of the Charter and the Refugee Rights Framework, rights regarding records expertise have been included in the Charter.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Transformative Practice in Out of Home Care: Chartering Rights in Recordkeeping

Golding

McKemmish

Reed

2021

Archives and Manuscripts

Self Cite

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Section: The Systematic Oppression Of the Rohingya People In Burma Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the genocidal campaign against the Rohingya by the military junta in Burma has been reported extensively (US Department of State, 2018;Lowenstein, 2015), focus has understandably been put on the ongoing human rights abuses and dispossession of land by those in power through physical rather than bureaucratic violence or what scholars in archival studies have argued should be rights in records for refugees and others who have experienced this kind of abuse (Carbone et al, 2021;Gilliland and Carbone, 2020). In accordance with their double-sided nature, records (official and in other less formal kinds of documentation) and recordkeeping (administrative, community, family and individual) play central roles not just in the eradication of the Rohingya people within current The Arweavebased Rohingya Archive…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed records in the Rohingya refugee diaspora: Arweave and the R-Archive

Sheikh

Gilliland

Kothe³

et al. 2022

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PurposeThis article delineates the pilot implementation of the Rohingya Archive (R-Archive). The R-Archive seeks to both confront and exploit the roles of documentation and recordkeeping in forced displacement of Rohingya people through targeted physical and bureaucratic violence in Myanmar. This grassroots activist intervention is located at the intersection of technology, rights, records, jurisdictions and economics. Using Arweave's blockweave, the R-Archive secures copies of records, such as identity documentation, land deeds and personal papers, carried into diaspora by Rohingya refugees against unauthorised alteration, deletion and loss, providing a trust infrastructure for accumulating available evidence in support of rights claims and cultural preservation.Design/methodology/approachIterative development of functional requirements, data collection processes and identification of a technological solution for the community-based, post-custodial, blockchain-inspired R-Archive; design and testing of the R-Archive pilot; and analysis of trust and economic concerns arising.FindingsA complex set of interconnecting considerations is raised by this use of emerging technologies in service to a vulnerable and diasporic community. Hostile governments and volatile cryptocurrencies are both threats to the distributed post-custodial R-Archive. However, the strength of the community bonds that form the archive and articulated in its records speak to the possibility of perdurance for a global Rohingya archive, and working through the challenges surfaced by its development offers the possibility to serve as a model that might be adaptable for other grassroots archival activist projects initiated by oppressed, marginalised and diasporic communities.Research limitations/implicationsPersonal and community safety and accessibility concerns, especially in refugee camps and under Covid-19 restrictions, presented particular challenges to carrying out the research and development that are addressed in the research design and future research plans.Practical implicationsThe goal of this pilot was to collect and store examples of a range of documents that demonstrate different aspects of Rohingya culture and links to the homeland as well as those that record formal evidentiary relationships between members of the Rohingya community now in diaspora and the Burmese state (e.g. acknowledgements of citizenship). The pilot was intended to demonstrate the viability of using a blockchain-inspired decentralised archival system combined with a community-driven approach to data collection and then to evaluate the results for potential to scale.Social implicationsThe R-Archive is a community-centred and driven effort to identify and preserve, under as secure and trusted conditions as possible, digital copies of documents that are of juridical, cultural and personal value to the Rohingya people and also of significance as primary documentary evidence that might be used by international legal institutions in investigating genocide taking place in Burma and by academic researchers studying the history of Burma.Originality/valueThe R-Archive is novel in terms of its technological application (Arweave), the economic concerns of a vulnerable stateless population it is trying to address, and its functional complexity, in that its goal is simultaneously to serve both legal evidentiary and community archive functions. The R-Archive is also an important addition to other notable efforts in the diasporic Rohingya community that have attempted to employ the tools of technology for cultural preservation.

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The perpetual twilight of records: consentful recordkeeping as moral defence

Rolan,

Lewis

2024

Arch Sci

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In this article, we examine the significance of establishing participatory and consentful recordkeeping practice in the face of ubiquitous use of records beyond their original intent. Among such secondary uses is the decontextualisation of data as part of the 'industrialisation' of access and use of ‘historical’ records within current transactional contexts, together with a wide range of data sharing practices arising from contemporary data science paradigms. To situate the call to action for consentful recordkeeping practice, we begin the article by exploring how human ability to navigate through the perpetual twilight of records becomes increasingly murky when a wholesale approach to data collection and governance is applied by machine learning practitioners. We then re-frame some classical archival principles to align them with participatory approaches; specifically, by expanding the scope of Jenkinsonian ‘moral defence’ as an imperative for proactive engagement with the Archival Multiverse. We then describe a case study of consentful recordkeeping in practice, using the example of the AiLECS Lab’s newly developed collection acquisition and management system. This principles-based framework informs our practices for collecting and curating datasets for machine learning research and development and aims to privilege the ongoing consent of those represented in records to their use. In the context of this work, our core premise is that technologies designed to prevent exploitation of children should aim to avoid underlying data practices that are themselves exploitative (of children or adults).

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Towards a Human Right in Recordkeeping and Archives

Cited by 5 publications

References 29 publications

Towards Transformative Practice in Out of Home Care: Chartering Rights in Recordkeeping

Towards Transformative Practice in Out of Home Care: Chartering Rights in Recordkeeping

Distributed records in the Rohingya refugee diaspora: Arweave and the R-Archive

The perpetual twilight of records: consentful recordkeeping as moral defence

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