ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: ARCHIVAL WORKERS AS CLIMATE ADVOCATES Amy Dawn Wickner Doctor of Philosophy, 2024 Dissertation directed by: Associate Professor Katie Shilton College of Information Studies Real-life examples of climate response under material constraints capture the risks facing archives, records, and archival workers amid environmental change, and the factors that complicate climate action. In this dissertation, I sought to understand how climate, environment, and ecology shape archival workers' experiences, practices, and perspectives on the future, including their norms and expectations for making change. I used three interconnected methods: a critical review of six decades of scholarly and professional literature; a literary analysis of archival practices in seven climate fiction texts; and interviews with 13 archivists concerned about climate change. The core argument of this dissertation is that forms of slow violence – Nixon's term for harm that “occurs gradually and out of sight” – produce unresolvable double binds, which catalyze archival workers into a community of climate advocates. This research finds that archival workers are trying to pursue principled work in conditions that prevent them from doing so – not only the material limitations of work sites, but also political obstacles to taking climate action. They develop politically expedient strategies and tactics in response to local circumstances, while using public statements and campaigns to extend their advocacy across the field. As climate advocates, they oscillate between positions as insiders and outsiders in the field, never settling in one stance from which to effect change. While they share a commitment that archives matter to climate response, complexity and contradiction hold them together as a community of advocates. Two key points of disagreement lie at the buzzing center of this community: first, whether archives are primarily resources or obstacles to climate action; and second, to what extent archival climate responses should align with or resist power relations that organize the state of the field (and the planet). There's ample knowledge in the archives field of the significance of climate change, the environmental impacts to and of archival work, the need for archivists to respond to the crisis, and methods for responding. However, such answers make little difference in everyday change- making, if they don't also face head-on the material conditions of archival work and the political relations that determine and reproduce those conditions. ARCHIVAL WORKERS AS CLIMATE ADVOCATES by Amy Dawn Wickner Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2024 Advisory Committee: Katie Shilton, Chair Lae'l Hughes-Watkins Kari Kraus Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, Dean's Representative Ricardo L. Punzalan © Copyright by Amy Dawn Wickner 2024 Acknowledgments University of Maryland land acknowledgment: Every community owes its existence and strength to the generations before them, around the world, who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy into making the history that led to this moment. Truth and acknowledgment are critical in building mutual respect and connections across all barriers of heritage and difference. So, we acknowledge the truth that is often buried: We are on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway People, who are the ancestral stewards of this sacred land. It is their historical responsibility to advocate for the four-legged, the winged, those that crawl and those that swim. They remind us that clean air and pristine waterways are essential to all life. This Land Acknowledgment is a vocal reminder for each of us as two-leggeds to ensure our physical environment is in better condition than what we inherited, for the health and prosperity of future generations. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Many people and relationships shaped this project along the way. I'm especially grateful to: ~ ~ members of the committee for your mentorship over the years; ~ ~ archival workers who shared their experiences and took time to think through this project with me: speaking with and learning from you has been a light in difficult times; ~ ~ colleagues in Resource Sharing at the University of Maryland Libraries, and inter-library loan workers everywhere; ~ ~ and coworkers, classmates, comrades, neighbors, teammates, friends, family, Daisy, and dusty: you shared your successes, struggles, and doubts so that I knew to keep going. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................ii Table of Contents..........................................................................................................................iii List of Figures.............................................................................................................................viii List of Tables...............................................................................................................................viii 1. Slow violence, double binds, and enunciatory communities: Framing the problem...........1 1.1. Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 1.2. Slow violence.......................................................................................................................5 1.2.1. Defining slow violence.................................................................................................6 1.2.2. Representing slow violence..........................................................................................7 1.2.3. Slow violence, archives, and records.........................................................................10 1.3. Enunciatory communities and double binds......................................................................13 1.3.1. Defining double binds................................................................................................15 1.3.2. Representing enunciatory communities.....................................................................21 1.3.3. Enunciatory communities, archives, and records.......................................................23 1.4. How to read this dissertation..............................................................................................25 2. A methodology for studying [with] archival workers and climate change.........................28 2.1. Futurity, archival studies, workers' inquiry: The research space........................................28 2.2. Questions, assumptions, choices: The methods and prior work........................................31 2.3. Critical literature review: norms and expectations.............................................................36 2.4. Climate fiction: responding to slow violence and double binds........................................41 2.5. Interview study: talking with archival climate advocates..................................................45 iii 2.5.1. Recruitment and consent............................................................................................45 2.5.2. Interview protocols.....................................................................................................48 2.5.3. Thematic analysis.......................................................................................................50 2.6. Where's the action? Data analysis continues......................................................................51 2.7. How to evaluate this research............................................................................................54 3. Negotiating knowledges, galvanizing advocacy: A critical literature review, 1963-2023. .59 3.1. Introduction........................................................................................................................59 3.2. Curating climate records: building archives, managing data.............................................60 3.2.1. Making records about climate....................................................................................61 3.2.2. Building collections about climate and environment.................................................62 3.2.3. Curating data: roles and responsibilities.....................................................................66 3.2.4. Recovering climate data from historical records........................................................69 3.3 Using climate records: finding sources, contesting access.................................................71 3.3.1. Identifying sources for climate research.....................................................................71 3.3.2. Towards better climate data sharing...........................................................................74 3.3.3. Contesting access to environmental information.......................................................75 3.3.4. Improving access systems for environmental records................................................79 3.3.5. Using archives and records about climate..................................................................82 3.4. Evaluating archival work: practices, risks, and impacts....................................................85 3.4.1. Evaluating records management.................................................................................86 3.4.2. Assessing climate risks: geography, organizations, costs...........................................89 3.4.3. Evaluating disaster planning.......................................................................................94 iv 3.4.4. Determining environmental impact............................................................................97 3.4.5. Setting measurements and standards........................................................................101 3.5. Designing systems: towards sustainable buildings and digital preservation...................103 3.5.1. Designing environmentally sustainable archives buildings.....................................103 3.5.2. Sustainability parameters for digital preservation....................................................106 3.6. Confronting archival politics: slow violence, advocacy, and activism............................108 3.6.1. Slow violence through archival harms.....................................................................109 3.6.2. Contending the purpose of archives.........................................................................113 3.6.3. Advocating and activating through archives............................................................115 3.7. Recognizing multiple ways of knowing: conflicts, records, and memory.......................118 3.8. Re-organizing archives: responsive networks, changing relationships............................123 3.8.1. Sharing knowledge and resources through networks...............................................123 3.8.2. Questioning, bending, changing standards...............................................................125 3.8.3. Organizing archives through time, technology, land................................................126 3.9. Recovering and responding: lessons from living through disaster..................................131 3.9.1. Assessing the damage, salvaging records.................................................................131 3.9.2. Using records in disaster recovery...........................................................................135 3.9.3. Moving archives.......................................................................................................136 3.9.4. Making archives part of climate response................................................................137 3.10. Conclusion......................................................................................................................139 3.10.1. In colonialism's wake.............................................................................................140 3.10.2. Making claims under austerity...............................................................................142 v 3.10.3. Towards climate action...........................................................................................144 3.10.4. Enunciatory communities.......................................................................................146 4. Recalling past and future to meet the changing present: Archival practices in climate fiction...........................................................................................................................................149 4.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................149 4.2. Changes in the land: relationships of precarity................................................................153 4.3. Slow violence: settler society responds to climate change..............................................156 4.4. Records that constrain: unreliable, missing, enclosed.....................................................160 4.5. Against documentation: tactics from below.....................................................................165 4.6. Making records: emergencies and uncertain futures........................................................169 4.7. Relations of responsibility: knowledge across generations.............................................171 4.8. How to be collective: solidarity, repair, dissent...............................................................175 4.9. Against slow violence: strategies, tactics, and skills........................................................180 4.10. Conclusion......................................................................................................................184 5. Becoming advocates: Archival workers concerned about climate change.......................188 5.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................188 5.2. Being archival workers: beginnings, conditions, and climate implications.....................189 5.2.1. Becoming archival workers......................................................................................190 5.2.2. Working within constraints.......................................................................................192 5.2.3. Labor implications for climate action.......................................................................196 5.3. Climate impacts for archivists: disasters, risks, politics, and interventions.....................200 5.3.1. Living through disaster.............................................................................................200 vi 5.3.2. Climate risks to and from archives...........................................................................204 5.3.3. Power-mapping climate politics...............................................................................205 5.3.4. Making interventions................................................................................................209 5.4. Making change: practices, principles, and experiences...................................................213 5.4.1. Building theory from experience..............................................................................213 5.4.2. How change happens................................................................................................215 5.4.3. Making change from outside and inside...................................................................217 5.4.4. Activist affects..........................................................................................................220 5.4.5. In solidarity...............................................................................................................222 5.5. Conclusion........................................................................................................................225 6. Refusing the double bind: building power as archival climate advocates........................230 6.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................230 6.1.1. How do archival workers engage with climate, ecology, and environment?...........231 6.1.2. How do slow violence and double binds shape these engagements?.......................231 6.1.3. What are archival workers’ norms and expectations for making change?...............233 6.1.4. To what extent and in what ways do they act in community?..................................234 6.2. Contributions of the research: For what? For whom?......................................................234 6.3. Climate advocacy norms for archival workers.................................................................239 6.3.1. Using the knowledge base........................................................................................239 6.3.2. Building power.........................................................................................................240 6.4.3. Embracing affect......................................................................................................244 References...................................................................................................................................248 vii List of Figures 1. Critical literature appraisal process............................................................................................41 2. Mapping slow violence in The Tiger Flu...................................................................................44 3. Grounded, iterative data analysis...............................................................................................52 4. Deploying our backlogs for climate adaptation.......................................................................246 List of Tables 1. Literature search strategy and outcomes....................................................................................38 2. Inclusion and exclusion criteria for critical literature review....................................................39 3. Critical literature appraisal criteria and questions.....................................................................40 4. Thematic analysis of archives literature: areas of impact..........................................................41 5. Thematic analysis of archival practices in climate fiction.........................................................44 6. Interview study anonymization principles.................................................................................46 7. Preliminary interview protocol..................................................................................................48 8. Follow-up interview protocol....................................................................................................49 9. Thematic analysis of interviews with archival workers.............................................................50 viii 1. Slow violence, double binds, and enunciatory communities: Framing the problem 1.1. Introduction A collection manager in Appalachia must identify the exact boxes she'll carry out of the archives building with her in case of emergency. Archives storage spaces have flooded before, and she wants to be prepared next time. The collections she's choosing between include the only remaining copies of building plans from across the country; in many cases, both the buildings and the other copies of their records have been damaged in California wildfires.1 A state archives in the United States' Mountain West floods due to a pipe leak in cold weather.2 Its fewer than 10 FTE staff must identify what can be salvaged and take swift steps to save it while maintaining their own health and safety.3 They may be experiencing primary or secondary trauma related to the disaster.4 Calling on other area archives for help is complicated because the state archives doesn't participate in regional emergency preparation and response networks.5 An archivist working out of a LEED-certified library building is speaking with an archivist based on a reservation in the U.S. Southwest. The tribal archivist wonders how to implement preservation best practices when his facility doesn't have a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. The region where they're based is projected to grow hotter over the next two decades, challenging the capacity to maintain stable storage conditions that are cool enough for records.6 Both archivists are convinced that standards and best practices should reflect the actual conditions they work in.7 An organization in the Northeast U.S. employs one archivist, who monitors sensors and reports environmental conditions for the building that houses the archives. Keeping a consistent eye on the readings is especially important given the building's 1 Samantha Winn, interview with the author, September 28, 2020. 2 Andrew Kenney, “2,000 Boxes of Colorado Archives Documents to Be Checked for Damage after Multiple Pipes Leak,” Colorado Public Radio, December 27, 2022, https://www.cpr.org/2022/12/27/colorado-archives- water-leak/. 3 “The State of State Records: A Statistical Report on State Archives and Records Management Programs in the United States” (Frankfort, KY: Council of State Archivists, 2021), https://www.statearchivists.org/viewdocument/2021-the-state-of-state-records-a. 4 Roger Craig, Tamara Selzer, and Josette Seymour, “There Is Disaster Planning and There Is Reality—the Cayman Islands National Archive (CINA) Experience with Hurricane Ivan,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 27, no. 2 (2006): 187–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/00379810601081396. 5 Council of State Archivists, “State of State Records,” D32. 6 U.S. Global Change Research Program, “Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation Assessment Tool,” n.d., https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/assessment-tool/home/. 7 Anonymous interview participant, interview with the author, June 22, 2020. 1 https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/assessment-tool/home/ https://doi.org/10.1080/00379810601081396 https://www.statearchivists.org/viewdocument/2021-the-state-of-state-records-a https://www.cpr.org/2022/12/27/colorado-archives-water-leak/ https://www.cpr.org/2022/12/27/colorado-archives-water-leak/ coastal location but, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization furloughs the archivist for months. An upcoming renovation can account for neither the archival collections nor climate-related needs if the only internal expert on both topics is not at the planning table.8 An archives of Black diaspora moves from one region and institutional home to another, currently located in a low-lying area of a coastal city in the Southeast U.S.9 Founded and developed in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the archives garners strong interest from predominantly white institutions (PWIs) as its collections and reputation grow. Like many HBCU-affiliated archives, this repository faces pressure to partner with PWIs but can't rely on those partners to respect its autonomy.10 The head of the archives knows from experience how climate-related disasters threaten the records of people, organizations, and entire movements. Archives staff accept responsibility for such records even as their own organization and livelihoods face many of the same climate risks. These real-life examples capture many of the risks facing archives, records, and archival workers amid climate change, as well as the factors complicating climate response. In this dissertation, I sought to understand how climate, ecology, and environment shape archives and records workers’ experiences, practices, and perspectives on the future, in order to identify directions for climate action in the archives field. I investigated these topics with a critical review of scholarly and professional literature, analysis of climate fiction texts, and interview study. Two theoretical frameworks have informed this project along the way. First, I argue that we can understand both the impacts of climate change and what is happening in, to, and through archival work as forms of “slow violence,” or harm that “occurs gradually and out of sight.”11 Second, in eliciting perspectives and experiences of archival workers concerned with climate, environment, and ecological matters in their work, I've come to see them as an “enunciatory 8 Anonymous interview participant, interview with the author, June 23, 2020. 9 Christopher Harter and Patrick Rasico, “File soon. June, 1987”: Archival Diasporas and the Urgency to Save During a Climate Emergency, interview by Petrouchka Moïse and Laura Wilson, Podcast, 53:46, May 6, 2022, FLAME (Future Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Excavation), https://open.spotify.com/episode/2x5LAFk2NwvuNh9iPUSlGg. 10 Sandra Phoenix and Monika Rhue, S3 E1: Our Ancestors' Wildest Dreams, interview by Sharon M. Burney, Podcast, 31:44, March 21, 2022, Material Memory, https://material-memory.clir.org/s3-e1-our-ancestors-wildest- dreams/. 11 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 2 https://material-memory.clir.org/s3-e1-our-ancestors-wildest-dreams/ https://material-memory.clir.org/s3-e1-our-ancestors-wildest-dreams/ https://open.spotify.com/episode/2x5LAFk2NwvuNh9iPUSlGg community”: connected less by shared interests or goals than by the seemingly unresolvable “double binds” in which they find themselves, to which they respond through advocacy. Discussions of archives, records, and climate/environmental matters in the professional and scholarly literature address eight interrelated activities: curating climate records, using records, designing technical systems, evaluating archival work, doing archival politics, recognizing multiple ways of knowing, doing archives differently, and recovering from and responding to climate disaster. Curating climate records includes activities like creating, collecting, and managing material from data to historical records to seeds. Using records includes identifying sources for climate research, contesting access to environmental records and data, and finding environment-related uses for records. Designing technical systems around climate concerns addresses energy reduction in buildings, systems, storage environments, and supply chains, with flexible standards as a key mechanism. The literature includes many accounts of evaluating archival work, such as records management practices, management of climate records, climate risks to archives, disaster preparedness, and environmental impacts. Readers confront archival politics like the role of archives in causing harm, contending the purpose of archives, and political activism around climate records and climate response. Studying archives and climate leads to recognizing multiple ways of knowing. Actually doing archival work differently would entail building networks for disaster planning and information sharing, or organizing archives around (for example) another sense of time or relationship to land. Insights drawn from experiencing disaster offer concrete lessons, like the steps and challenges involved in recovery, and insistence on archives being part of any large-scale climate response. A study of archival practices in seven climate fiction narratives illustrates how slow violence exacerbates climate crisis and its impacts. Climate change and resulting social reorganizations 3 each force people to change how they relate to land. As people improvise practices to survive under these conditions, emerging social formations use counter-surveillance tactics like avoiding documentation and destroying records. On the other hand, creating and keeping records can also help people endure rapid change by making sense of what's happening or accessing resources. Climate novels offer instances of highly relational archive and memory keeping, from which archival workers may draw lessons in collectivity. Finally, characters use flexible tactics to resist slow violence. Each of the above suggests possible paths for archival workers to contribute: fighting information enclosures, performing emergency record keeping, acknowledging relationality and multiple knowledges, and building collectives to resist slow violence. Although archives and records practices can perpetuate slow violence and trap people in inescapable double binds, they can also undergird methods for long-term resistance and recovery. Through an interview study with 13 archival workers involved in a variety of climate actions in the field, I learned that slow violence manifests through widespread problems with archival working conditions and inequitable resource allocation among archives. The competing demands to pursue a principled practice while operating within resource and political constraints constitute a double bind for archival workers. A second set of conflicting injunctions lies in participants' oscillating positioning as insiders or outsiders in the archives field, and the forms of power that each positioning affords. Interviewees agree on the urgency of climate action in the archives field. Building theory from experience – of working in archives, and of living through disaster – they develop a concept of how change happens in the archives field, in the process of pursuing climate action. In several areas, such as waste/energy use and appraisal, they've used politically expedient strategies to effect local change. 4 1.2. Slow violence “Slow violence” is Nixon’s term for resource extraction, environmental damage, and displacement that accompany and result from globalization. It’s “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”12 It’s difficult to represent slow violence and those who suffer from it. I chose to ground this project in the concept of slow violence for several reasons. First, I’m interested in the extent to which archivists’ experiences, practices, and perspectives relate to the ravages of resource extraction and its causes. How do archival workers and their practices give shape to the full scope of slow violence and make it representable? “Slow violence” is an appropriate framework to explore the capacity of archives and records to tell stories about long-term environmental damage. Second, the notion of hidden, attenuated, accumulating, and hard-to-see violence is an archival one. I mean this less in terms of the “dusty old archives” trope than in reference to archives’ association with marginalization, silence, and the colonial and imperial logics that organize archival theory and practice.13 Slow violence, like archival work, is about conflicting ways of organizing time, beginning with archiving and record keeping that supported colonial imaginaries by segmenting and classifying people, land, and things. Using permanence, long-term preservation, and imagined future users as points of reference for archival work each institutionalizes narrow definitions of records and preservation, while locking repositories into a model of growth as the only good.14 Furthermore, as Sutherland writes in the U.S. context, “strict adherence to the materiality of records, the de- 12 Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 13 J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “‘To Go Beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” Archival Science 19, no. 2 (June 2019): 71–85, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09311-1. 14 James M. O’Toole, “On the Idea of Permanence,” The American Archivist 52, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 10–25, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.52.1.3x85283576r43387; Tonia Sutherland, “Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2: Critical Archival Studies (2017): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.42. 5 https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.42 https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.52.1.3x85283576r43387 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09311-1 legitimization of alternate forms of recordkeeping, and the standards of permanence inevitably leads to oblivion; those records that resist traditional American archivy are relegated to the discarded past, unable to be resurrected and used to support claims of human rights abuses.”15 1.2.1. Defining slow violence Time, speed, and displacement characterize and make it difficult to see slow violence, which entails dispossession, widening inequality, and “ecological degradation” amid globalization.16 The gradual erosion of environments and human rights makes for “imperceptible violence” and “imperceptible change whereby violence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time.”17 Such long-term damage may be invisible amid the Anthropocene’s “high- speed planetary modification” and simultaneous “rapid modifications to the human cortex” that affect people's capacities to pay attention.18 The speed and endless flexibility that transnational corporations pursue contrasts with the “slow erosions of environmental justice.”19 Slow violence brings people into conflict through incompatible forms of time: “a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time’s scales.”20 For instance, the oil industry thrives on “borrowed time” by exploiting deposits of the past in ways that foreshorten possibilities for the future.21 Slow violence encompasses many forms of displacement. Nixon defines these as linked processes of environmental extraction, physical eviction, and “administered invisibility” – 15 Sutherland, “Archival Amnesty,” 14. 16 Nixon, Slow Violence, 46. 17 Nixon, Slow Violence, 11. 18 Nixon, Slow Violence, 12. 19 Nixon, Slow Violence, 8. 20 Nixon, Slow Violence, 17. 21 Nixon, Slow Violence, 69. 6 including both rhetorical and records-based strategies that deny people their rights.22 Although many forms of slow violence have to do with forced mobility – as in the example of Indian mega-dams displacing thousands – there are also instances of “unnatural boundaries” that actually impose immobility, for example by making “transfrontier” people vulnerable to exclusion and statelessness at any time.23 Slow violence not only displaces people from land but also displaces risk from powerful entities, Nixon argues. Through neoliberal globalization, transnational corporations offload risk onto poor people by exploiting deregulation, benefiting from how “laws and loopholes are selectively applied,” and using “free market ideology” as cover.24 Risk displacement also happens through the creation of “disposable people,” such as dispossessed locals and “pliable” migrant workers whom corporations and states import to perform resource extraction.25 Importantly for an archival studies project, displacement also threatens people with forgetting and loss, for instance the way “places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them.”26 People become unable to remain in place, or trapped in places that are eroding around them or are polluted with the detritus of war. “Irretrievable” places are those in which long-term inhabitants can no longer survive, thanks to changes wrought by temporary newcomers. Struggling against this loss of memory and livelihood, Nixon writes, catalyzes poor people’s environmentalism. 1.2.2. Representing slow violence Slow violence resists representation or “standing for” in two senses: depiction or reproduction, as in literature, and in terms of political recognition. One reason is scale. Slow 22 Nixon, Slow Violence, 151. 23 Nixon, Slow Violence, 195, 196. 24 Nixon, Slow Violence, 46. 25 Nixon, Slow Violence, 71. 26 Nixon, Slow Violence, 7. 7 violence is administered from afar, but it affects bodies at the cellular level. The sheer scope of inequality, displacement, distance, and “a huge chorus of disenfranchised voices” can make the task of representation impossible.27 Nixon refers to slow violence as “attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space,” arguing that they can be imperceptible and all- encompassing at once.28 Temporal scale matters too: sustained attention over time is necessary to perceive changes that are due to slow violence; they may go unnoticed if effects are delayed. Furthermore, environmental disaster and its long aftermath are hard to represent thanks to unstable standards for what's legible as a crisis. The “illusion of the singular event” makes it easier not to see immiseration and environmental degradation as a pattern.29 There's also a category Nixon calls “administered invisibility,” which includes statistical measures of impact that fail to account for all of the people involved, and incalculable displacements that simply overwhelms record keeping efforts. 30 Like statistical devices, narrative devices can also conceal slow violence. For example, “military euphemism,” such as the use of surgical metaphors, makes technologies of war seem precise when they aren't.31 Stories of slow violence and oil extraction compete with frontier narratives, triumphalist notions of “linear development,” and fantasies about mineral strikes and instant success.32 In the case of huge projects like dam-building, the circumstances of developmental refugees are difficult to capture amid “celebratory rhetoric,” nationalist “technological sublime,” and spectacle.33 Images of charismatic mega-fauna in an imagined bush landscape, the Western desire for “an ancient African ferocity,” and “elegiac narratives” about 27 Nixon, Slow Violence, 74. 28 Nixon, Slow Violence, 7. 29 Nixon, Slow Violence, 51. 30 Nixon, Slow Violence, 151. 31 Nixon, Slow Violence, 200. 32 Nixon, Slow Violence, 82, 71. 33 Nixon, Slow Violence, 158-60. 8 the decline of species all push aside the struggles of people who suffer when ecotourism and big game reserves only bring more fencing, more surveillance.34 Each of the above narratives also figures in archives literature, from techno-utopian discourses about archival futures, to the popular metaphor of biodiversity as an Alexandrian Library of life.35 Mass movements of poor people struggle to be understood amid these competing, dominating imaginaries. Their stories of slow violence, translated from oral cultures into novels or from collective experience into memoir, can seem “unplaceable” and disappear from public attention as a result.36 Archives too have long been ill-suited to representing memory and knowledge relevant to oral, embodied, and collective traditions and mass social movements.37 Nixon studies slow violence and how to resist it by analyzing “the political, imaginative, and strategic role of environmental writer-activists.”38 Subjects of the book embody multiple stances and relationships to movement politics and organized resistance, such as one who turned to writing after years of intense involvement in movements, “not as a means of escape but of confrontation.”39 There may be comparable links between archival advocacy and movement politics. In choosing the works, lives, and politics of writer-activists for subjects, Nixon acknowledges that “to address violence discounted by dominant structures of apprehension is necessarily to engage the culturally variable issue of who counts as a witness.”40 Witness, 34 Nixon, Slow Violence, 179, 191. 35 Gordon M. Sayre, “The Alexandrian Library of Life: A Flawed Metaphor for Biodiversity,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (November 2017): 280–99, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4215238; Eira Tansey, “Review of Archival Futures,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 6 (2019): Article 17; Mél Hogan and Sarah T. Roberts, “Archiving for Extinction,” Media-N 19, no. 1: Afterlives of Data (Spring 2023): 7–26, https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v19i1.936. 36 Nixon, Slow Violence, 111. 37 Donald L. Fixico, “The Native American Researcher: Another View of Historical Documents,” The Midwestern Archivist 8, no. 2 (1983): 5–15; Lynnette Russell, “Indigenous Knowledge and Archives: Accessing Hidden History and Understandings,” Australian Academic & Research Libraries 36, no. 2 (2005): 161–71; Nora Almeida and Jen Hoyer, “The Living Archive in the Anthropocene,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1: Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene (2020), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.96. 38 Nixon, Slow Violence, 15. 39 Nixon, Slow Violence, 78. 40 Nixon, Slow Violence, 16. 9 https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.96 https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v19i1.936 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4215238 counting, conflict, and seeing are each relevant to archival work; climate change and its impacts shape their place in day-to-day practice. 1.2.3. Slow violence, archives, and records Examples from archival literature on climate and environment illustrate how record keeping facilitates the forms of displacement associated with slow violence. In a study of the record keeping practices behind two major environmental disasters, Tansey describes how a federally mandated environmental impact form provided the oil company BP with a sanctioned means to fabricate information.41 This set the stage for failures of post-disaster recovery following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Records mismanagement and agency capture each defy charismatic representation, but they're part of the slow violence visited on communities surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. Nixon foresees that climate crisis will intensify military- industrial responses, such as “wall[ing] off the wealthy”; exploring, drilling, and claiming land further and further under the ocean; and “heightened corporate mobility” through which corporate responsibility disappears in mergers and subcontracting.42 Tansey’s research suggests that record keeping will play a role in each of these futures but won’t necessarily serve transparency or accountability. Archives and records can themselves function as mechanisms of displacement. In a paper explicitly connecting archival practices to slow violence, Bell describes the situation of the indigenous I’ai community in Papua New Guinea’s Purari Delta.43 Amid incursions by logging and gas companies, I’ai have relied on archival records such as “land leases, health, fisheries, 41 Eira Tansey, “Regulatory Recordkeeping, Worker Safety, and United States Extractive Industries,” The Extractive Industries and Society 7, no. 1 (January 2020): 209–16, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2020.01.010. 42 Nixon, Slow Violence, 265, 270. 43 Joshua A. Bell, “Dystopian Realities and Archival Dreams in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 24, no. 1 Special Issue: Utopian Archives, Decolonial Affordances (February 2016): 20–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12285. 10 https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12285 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2020.01.010 forestry, foreign researchers, and oil and mineral exploration records dating from the late 1960s to the present” to support their resource rights claims.44 Specifically, records allow them to make types of claims that government and transnational corporations would recognize. However, the decline of archives through abandonment and arson places these records and claims out of reach. In this example, a records regime helps to disenfranchise and trap Indigenous people in place. Drake’s study of the 2005 Danziger Bridge shooting in New Orleans previews the role archives and records are likely to continue playing as climate change leads to floods, mass migration, and militaristic responses.45 One week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, “a team of seven New Orleans Police Department officers and one St. Landry’s Parish Deputy Sheriff shot six civilians, leaving two of them dead and the other four seriously wounded.”46 In an act of what Drake calls “instant manufacture” of records, a police report distorted and omitted details of the situation.47 Climate crisis will continue to offer cover to representatives of the state for fabricating records, thereby undermining accountability for human rights abuses. Investigators in the 2005 case cited “law and order” values and conditions of “chaos and confusion” to exonerate police; the record keeping rules allowed such narratives to dominate proceedings around police brutality in a disaster situation. 48 Drake’s study acknowledges how “non-state actors and the records they generate as victims’ advocates serve a historical as well as judicial accountability.”49 Given myriad examples of time understood to be cyclical, entangled, backwards, and otherwise nonlinear, Caswell notes the violence that archival organization does in presuming a 44 Bell, “Dystopian Realities,” 21. 45 Jarrett M. Drake, “Insurgent Citizens: The Manufacture of Police Records in Post-Katrina New Orleans and Its Implications for Human Rights,” Archival Science 14, no. 3–4 (October 2014): 365–80, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9224-2. 46 Drake, “Insurgent Citizens,” 370. 47 Drake, “Insurgent Citizens,” 375. 48 Drake, “Insurgent Citizens,” 371. 49 Drake, “Insurgent Citizens,” 367. 11 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9224-2 linear sense of time in which past, present, and future proceed separately and in that order.50 Linear or progressive time affects people's lives through records regimes, as well as shaping representation in archives and collective memory. To document “traces of ongoing oppression” requires “shift[ing] the moment of archival responsibility, from a singular present to a multiplicity of uncertain pasts, presents, and futures” and “a different orientation to time.”51 Caswell's concepts of “chronoviolence” and “urgent archives” resonate with elements of slow violence. Slow violence takes place over hyperattenuated linear time scales under control of global capital, which conflicts with how people experience time amid environmental destruction. Both Nixon and Caswell write about multiple senses of representation, from political power to how communities and their struggles appear in writing and records. Climate change’s impacts fall differently thanks to “the inequities between those who have grown rich off hydrocarbon culture and the predominantly poor people—from the Maldives to Niger—who are low-level hydrocarbon consumers but at greatest initial risk from the climate crisis.”52 As displacement affects the latter first and most, public discourses in wealthy nations will continue to characterize climate refugees as floods, waves, surges, or flows – as seen, for instance, in recent U.S. moral panics about Central American migrants escaping violence and climate-related vulnerability. Such media representations epitomize slow violence by prioritizing a North Atlantic sensibility of threat, over the precarity of poor people in and from the global South.53 The carceral structures that migrants encounter further victimize and make them 50 Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (London: Routledge, 2021). 51 Caswell, Urgent Archives, 26. 52 Nixon, Slow Violence, 266. 53 Trouillot uses the term “North Atlantic” to more precisely locate the heart of imperialism-colonialism-capitalism, and to argue for the continuity of 20th-century modernism and 20th/21st-century globalization with those preceding, world-altering systems: “Indeed, the place we most often call the West is best called the North Atlantic—not only for the sake of geographical precision but also because such usage frees us to emphasize that 'the West' is always a fiction, an exercise in global legitimation. That exercise sometimes takes the form of an explicit project in the hands of intellectual, economic, or political leaders. Yet most humans who see themselves as Westerners, aspire to become so, or criticize that aspiration experience the West in the form of a projection: 12 invisible through records practices.54 Each of these archival connections to slow violence implicates archives and record keeping in forms of displacement, establishing the challenges that face archival workers organizing and taking action in response to climate change. 1.3. Enunciatory communities and double binds To give shape to how I'll describe archivists' climate responses, I'll next turn to the framework of “enunciatory communities.” Fortun developed this concept as a way to characterize how different advocate formations and alignments came together in the aftermath of the 1984 Bhopal disaster.55 As they make claims about harm, culpability, and restitution, participants in these formations also remember and continually recreate the disaster through remembering – thereby making truth claims about what happened when and why. Rather than forming through shared interests or goals, enunciatory communities manifest through how they make such claims: In my account, stakeholder communities become 'enunciatory communities.' Some, like gas victims, are relatively tied to one locale; others are more dispersed and include corporate and government officials, medical and legal professionals, and environmental activists working at various tiers of regional, national, and transnational organizations. Like stakeholder communities, enunciatory communities often share certain interests. But they do not necessarily think in the same way about what those interests mean or about how those interests can be protected. Sometimes shared interest is not even what holds an enunciatory community together.56 the projection of the North Atlantic as the sole legitimate site for the universal, the default category, the unmarked—so to speak—of all human possibilities.” As Ghaddar demonstrates, contemporary archival standards, practices, and politics issue directly from this dynamic. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1-2; J. J. Ghaddar, “Provenance in Place: Crafting the Vienna Convention for Global Decolonization and Archival Repatriation,” in Disputed Archival Heritage, ed. James Lowry (London: Routledge, 2023), 49–86. 54 Jennifer Hale Eagle, “'I Want Them to Know We Suffer Here': Preserving Records of Migrant Detention in Opposition to Racialized Immigration Enforcement Structures,” Journal of Radical Librarianship 5 (2019), https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/32. 55 This refers to a massive industrial disaster originating at a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India. Fortun's study maps the complex and ongoing contests and conflicts, among many parties, over the origins, scope, scale, and implications of the disaster and what came after. Kim Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 56 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 11. 13 https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/32 Enunciatory communities are “assumed to be fissured within, even when members themselves insist otherwise,” and cannot either persist across time and space or “devolve into benign pluralism.”57 Fortun's definition of advocacy – “a performance of ethics in anticipation of the future” – contains within it the need for enunciatory communities and their activism to always be changing, as the future they anticipate shifts and morphs, coming closer and getting further away.58 Fortun further distinguishes enunciatory communities from groups that share ways of analyzing and responding to problems (“epistemic communities”) or that share languages and ways of knowing (“interpretive communities”). This is because, she argues, what constitutes an enunciatory community is neither its way of making sense of circumstances nor its overall ordering of categories, meaning, and relevance. Instead of locating enunciatory communities via indicators of interest or epistemological habit, I have focused on fields of force and contradiction—on the double binds that position enunciatory communities within new world orders. These double binds are more than 'context' conventionally conceived. Enunciatory communities do not exist prior to the double bind, with which they deal according to an already coherent identity. Enunciatory communities are produced by double binds, which call into play both new and entrenched ways of engaging the world. The “identity” of enunciatory communities is strategically configured; collectivity is not a matter of shared values, interests, or even culture, but a response to temporally specific paradox.59 Enunciatory communities can contain – in fact, are expected to contain – conflicting epistemologies and interpretive frameworks; what constitutes them instead is a double bind. 57 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 13. 58 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 16. 59 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 11. 14 1.3.1. Defining double binds Given how many ways there are to use the phrase “double bind” (both colloquially and theoretically), I want to be as precise as possible about how I'm using the term, and and how I understand different situations to be double binds. Fortun develops a sense of the term following Bateson et al., whose concept of a double bind is a circumstance involving: 1. two or more persons; 2. repeated experience; 3. a primary negative injunction; 4. “a secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level”; 5. and “a tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping the field”60 Double binds can manifest as a “double burden” imposed by demands that can't be reconciled.61 Some prior work poses double binds as examples of existential challenges, in which ways of being or acting within a particular domain work in direct contradiction to the goals of the activity.62 In one example that archival workers might recognize, Poirier notes how naming something erases part of it.63 Hanna characterizes Fortun's use of the double bind concept as a 60 Bateson et al. use the term “victim” to refer to the person who's the subject of contradictory communications, and who's struggling with and unable to resolve the double bind. Gregory Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson, University of Chicago Press edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 206-7. 61 Peter Mark Stephenson, “The Double Bind and the Double Burden: Implications for the Professional Education and Practice of Indigenous Environmental Health Practitioners” (PhD, University of Technology, Sydney, 2001), https://eprints.batchelor.edu.au/id/eprint/305. 62 Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun, “Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 1 (March 2005): 43–54, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.1.043; Stacey A. Langwick, “Articulate(d) Bodies: Traditional Medicine in a Tanzanian Hospital,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 3 (August 2008): 428–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00044.x; Deana Jovanović, “Prosperous Pollutants: Bargaining with Risks and Forging Hopes in an Industrial Town in Eastern Serbia,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 83, no. Issue 3: Economies of growth or ecologies of survival? (2018): 489–504, https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2016.1169205; Stacey A. Langwick, “A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 3 (August 2018): 415–43, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.3.06; Lindsay Poirier, “Knowledge Representation in Scruffy Worlds: An Ethnography of Semiotic Infrastructure Design Work” (PhD, Troy, NY, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2018), https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13015/2171; Michael Lachney, Madison C. Allen, and Briana P. Green, “The Double Bind of Constructionism: A Case Study on the Barriers for Constructionist Learning in Pre-College Engineering Education” (ASEE’s Virtual Conference: At Home with Engineering Education, Virtual Conference, 2020), Paper ID #29179, https://monolith.asee.org/public/conferences/172/papers/29179/view; Shreyas Sreenath, “(Un)Making the Manual Scavenger: Caste, Contract, and Ecological Uncertainty in Bengaluru, India,” American Ethnologist 50, no. 3 (August 2023): 491–505, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13202. 63 Poirier, “Knowledge Representation.” 15 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13202 https://monolith.asee.org/public/conferences/172/papers/29179/view https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13015/2171 https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.3.06 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2016.1169205 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00044.x https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.1.043 https://eprints.batchelor.edu.au/id/eprint/305 euphemism for “the precise mechanisms of state-corporate power.”64 This is why, although Bateson's model was about communication and emotions, in studying archives and climate change we have to go beyond double binds as a matter of feelings or discourse and look at the material conditions that produce them, and that they produce. Several studies emphasize the nature of double binds as problems that both catalyze and undermine advocates' strategies.65 Double binds move people to make claims – for resources, to representation, and so on – and also characterize the process of making claims. Sometimes this looks like insisting on the legitimacy of a particular way of contending a case, in the face of an immovable system in which those methods and their content can't be recognized.66 In fact, many prior works begin from the double bind of making claims in a context that can't acknowledge them. Putting forward certain demands might require that people make use of ideas or ways of articulating or pressing claims that are actually incompatible with how they understand the world.67 This may means advocating within two or more domains, simultaneously following the 64 Bridget Corbett Hanna, “Toxic Relief: Science, Uncertainty, and Medicine after Bhopal” (PhD, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2014), 43. 65 Britta Lundgren, “Health Politics, Solidarity and Social Justice: An Ethnography of Enunciatory Communities during and after the H1N1 Pandemic in Sweden,” Ethnologia Europaea 47, no. 2 (2017): 22–39; Ramey Arlen Moore, “Our Land Is Not Just Soil: Knowing, Feeling, and Doing Environmental Activism in the Arkansas Ozarks” (PhD, Fayetteville, AR, University of Arkansas, 2017), https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/2560/; Alex M. Nading, “Living in a Toxic World,” Annual Review of Anthropology 49 (October 2020): 209–24, https://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-074557; Kirsty Howey and Timothy Neale, “Divisible Governance: Making Gas-Fired Futures during Climate Collapse in Northern Australia,” Science, Technology, & Human Values, January 2022, 1–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211072573. 66 Peter C. Little, “Vapor Intrusion: The Political Ecology of an Emerging Environmental Health Concern,” Human Organization 72, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 121–31; Winifred Tate, “Proxy Citizenship and Transnational Advocacy: Colombian Activists from Putumayo to Washington, DC,” American Ethnologist 40, no. 1 (February 2013): 55– 70, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12005; Peter C. Little, Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Peter C. Little, “New Toxics Uncertainty and the Complexity Politics of Emerging Vapor Intrusion Risk,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health, ed. Merrill Singer (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 281–301; Anna Lora‐Wainwright and Ajiang Chen, “China’s Cancer Villages: Contested Evidence and the Politics of Pollution,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health, ed. Merrill Singer (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 396–416; Lucy Pei, Benedict Salazar Olgado, and Roderic Crooks, “Narrativity, Audience, Legitimacy: Data Practices of Community Organizers,” in CHI EA ’22: Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22, New Orleans, LA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022), Article No.: 328, https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519673. 67 Lauren Leve, “‘Secularism Is a Human Right!’: Double-Binds of Buddhism, Democracy, and Identity in Nepal,” 16 https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519673 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12005 https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211072573 https://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-074557 https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/2560/ often incompatible norms of each.68 For example, Callison identifies a double bind in climate policy as how to make a science-based matter matter to lots of different people, and how to go beyond merely throwing more facts at them.69 Howey and Neale look at how support for fracking gets rationalized at the same time that different actors acknowledge that it's bad for the environment.70 Enunciations that call communities into being can be more than statements; they can also consist of overt and covert positions that hail interlocutors as insiders or outsiders.71 Faruque characterizes enunciatory communities as the “development of solidarity, despite ongoing tensions and differences in basic goals.”72 Callahan characterizes the concept as a “critique of forced consensus”; in other words, a critique of practices, not just of how they are represented.73 This shapes how people relate to the past as activists, acting within crises and double binds that are now ordinary.74 in The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, ed. Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (Cambridge: The practice of human rights : tracking law between the global and the local, 2007), 78–113; Lauren Fordyce, “Birthing the Diaspora: Technologies of Risk Among Haitians in South Florida” (PhD, University of Florida, 2008), https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0022044/00001/images; Heather Tidrick, “‘Gadžology’ as Activism: What I Would Have Ethnography Do for East European Roma,” Collaborative Anthropologies 3 (2010): 121–31, https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2010.0012; Teresa Angélica Velásquez, “Going Green: Sustainable Mining, Water, and the Remaking of Social Protest in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador” (PhD, Austin, TX, University of Texas at Austin, 2012), http://hdl.handle.net/2152/19460; Brian Robert Callahan, “Complexities of Collaboration: An Open Source Story” (PhD, Troy, NY, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2018), https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13015/2285. 68 Jörg Friedrichs, “Peak Energy and Climate Change: The Double Bind of Post-Normal Science,” Futures 43 (2011): 469–77, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.12.004; Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast (London: Pluto Press, 2018); Alex Nading and Lucy Lowe, “Social Justice as Epidemic Control: Two Latin American Case Studies,” Medical Anthropology 37, no. 6: Technologies and Materialities of Epidemic Control (2018): 458–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2018.1485021. 69 Candis Callison, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 70 Howey and Neale, “Divisible Governance.” 71 Moore, “Our Land Is Not Just Soil.” 72 M. Omar Faruque, “Confronting Neoliberal Resource Policy: Mining Conflict and Coal Politics in Bangladesh,” in Social Movements Contesting Natural Resource Development, ed. John F. Devlin (New York: Routledge, 2020), 67. 73 Callahan, “Complexities of Collaboration.” 74 Amy Levine, South Korean Civil Movement Organisations: Hope, Crisis, and Pragmatism in Democratic Transition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 17 https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2018.1485021 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.12.004 https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13015/2285 http://hdl.handle.net/2152/19460 https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2010.0012 https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0022044/00001/images Although my dissertation is about archival workers advocating about climate change – or more broadly, archival work and/as climate response, including advocacy – archivists often align with the position of receiving, administering, and acknowledging claims. Prior work on double binds in the administration of claims is relevant here. One often-cited instance of a double bind finds subjects oscillating between the financial well-being of service organizations and the well- being of constituent individuals, communities, and environments.75 Not doing harm is on an equal footing with protecting the bottom line. Providing services is on an equal footing with satisfying funders that services are being provided. Many archives and archival workers operate along exactly these lines, either directly or in carrying out the decisions of parent organizations. Prior works also highlight the ideological apparatuses that produce double binds in administering claims.76 In one example, state obsession with technoscientific expertise limits climate response in Guyana to what can be determined within the bounds of technoscience.77 Similarly and circularly, climate response within the archives field may end up being limited to what archival workers already consider to fall within the bounds of archival work. Given the academic capture 75 Eriksen, Boomtown; Erica Caple James, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); Paul Jobin, “‘Nuclear Gypsies’ in Fukushima before and after 3/11,” in Nuclear Portraits: Communities, the Environment, and Public Policy, ed. Laurel Sefton MacDowell (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 274–311; Katherine Venter, Denise Currie, and Martin McCracken, “‘You Can’t Win’: The Non-Profit Double-Bind and Experiences of Organisational Contradictions in the Non-Profit and Voluntary Sector,” Work, Employment and Society 33, no. 2 (April 2019): 244–61, https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017017713949. 76 Werner Krauss, “European Landscapes: Heritage, Participation and Local Communities,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian J. Graham and Peter Howard (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008), 425–38; Sarah E. Vaughn, “Reconstructing the Citizen: Disaster, Citizenship, and Expertise in Racial Guyana,” Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 4 (December 2012): 359–87, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X12467718; Saiba Varma, “The Medical Net: Patients, Psychiatrists and Paper Trails in the Kashmir Valley” (PhD, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University, 2013), https://hdl.handle.net/1813/34122; Robert Werth, “The Construction and Stewardship of Responsible yet Precarious Subjects: Punitive Ideology, Rehabilitation, and ‘Tough Love’ among Parole Personnel,” Punishment & Society 15, no. 3 (July 2013): 219– 46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474513481720. 77 Vaughn, “Reconstructing the Citizen.” 18 https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474513481720 https://hdl.handle.net/1813/34122 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X12467718 https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017017713949 of both Anthropocene narratives and professional archives literature, the archival imagination about climate response may be narrower still.78 A further characteristic of double binds is the experience of using what(ever) you have at hand to make and respond to claims, but finding that the tools are always unequal to explaining the situation.79 For example, standards can be of limited use for explaining, much less advocating within, complicated or politically charged topics.80 How are people to address major problems (which they can't control) when barely able to control the material conditions of their work?81 Advocates are left with uncertainty being the only certainty.82 Because there's no way out of double binds, but people need to live, such situations prompt creative action to survive.83 Fortun is careful to specify that double binds go beyond difficult choices in that there are no ethical referents available to resolve them. This results in “a persistent mismatch between explanation and everyday life, forcing ethical agents to 'dream up' new ways of understanding and engaging 78 Almeida and Hoyer, “Living Archive"; Eira Tansey, “The Academic Enclosure of American Archivist,” The American Archivist 86, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2023): 117–40, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-86.1.117. 79 Dean Nieusma, “Alternative Design Scholarship: Working toward Appropriate Design,” Design Issues 20, no. 3: STS and the Social Shaping of Design (Summer 2004): 13–24. 80 Werner Krauss, “Escaping the Double Bind: From the Management of Uncertainty Toward Integrated Climate Research,” in Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations, ed. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall (New York: Routledge, 2016), 413–23; Alex M. Nading, “Local Biologies, Leaky Things, and the Chemical Infrastructure of Global Health,” Medical Anthropology 36, no. 2 (2017): 141–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2016.1186672. 81 Michael Lachney et al., “Local Classrooms, Global Technologies: Toward the Integration of Sociotechnical Macroethical Issues Into Teacher Education,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 38, no. 1–2 (June 2018): 13–22, https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467620902972. 82 David J. Hess, “Ethnography and the Development of Science and Technology Studies,” in Sage Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson et al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Pubications, 2001), 234–45. 83 Sharon McKenzie Stevens, “Speaking Out: Toward an Institutional Agenda for Refashioning STS Scholars as Public Intellectuals,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 33, no. 6 (November 2008): 730–53, https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243907310162; Sharon Te Apiti Stevens, “On Being in Time for Transition,” in Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse, ed. Richard Douthwaite, Gillian Fallon, and Living Economies, New Zealand edition (Carleton, NZ: Living Economies Educational Trust, 2011); Sarah E. Vaughn, “Between a Promise and a Trench: Citizenship, Vulnerability, and Climate Change in Guyana” (PhD, New York, NY, Columbia University, 2013), https://doi.org/10.7916/D8154GDR; Trevor J. Durbin, “Big Ocean: Marine Conservation, Bureaucratic Practice, and the Politics of Vagueness in the Pacific Islands” (PhD, Houston, TX, Rice University, 2014), https://hdl.handle.net/1911/87796; Sakari Tamminen, Biogenetic Paradoxes of the Nation: Finncattle, Apples, and Other Genetic-Resource Puzzles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 19 https://hdl.handle.net/1911/87796 https://doi.org/10.7916/D8154GDR https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243907310162 https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467620902972 https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2016.1186672 https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-86.1.117 the world. They provided a lens for observing experiences produced by established rules and systems, yet not adequately described in standard explanations of how these systems function and change.”84 One of the ways Fortun elucidates the concept struck me as especially relevant to the condition of archival workers today: “First, their identity cannot be divorced from context. If citizens are irrational, it is because they are responding to an irrational context.”85 Enunciatory communities and double binds offer a counter-framework to consensus-manufacturing discourses about professional values. Focusing on values as unifying characteristics of archival work and workers can elide the painful confusions and contradictions of working in the field, as well as the material circumstances (increasingly constrained for most) that shape archivists' actions. These aren't characteristics of workers, but of the environments in which we sell our labor for wages. It's also useful to step away from understanding archival workers as constituting an epistemic community of technical problem-solving experts, or an interpretive community that shares a culture or way of thinking and knowing. For the former, expertise does little to describe or explain the experiences of those working and living in contingency and precarity. And for the latter, to conceive of archival workers concerned about climate change as belonging to an interpretive community would be to flatten the differences among them, the sometimes irreconcilable disagreements born of experience and respective places within work-site and societal power relations. Although archival workers may have some common ways of enunciating, advocating, and even making sense of experiences, it's not clear that they would even self-consciously consider themselves to be part of a community.86 Fortun's view of 84 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 13. 85 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 13. 86 As I discuss further in chapters 2, 5, and 6, I began this project assuming that archival climate advocates would largely see themselves as part of a community of climate advocates in the field, but found that this was not strictly the case. 20 enunciatory communities as constantly changing and adapting can be a promising one: “They are chameleonlike, morphing in response to the interplays in which they find themselves, learning as they go—developing new strategies at every turn.”87 1.3.2. Representing enunciatory communities What distinguishes the enunciatory from the discursive in how Fortun explains advocacy is that “enunciations are made by specific individuals, in specific times and places” (361) which Fortun argues is not the case for statements. Furthermore, synthesizing theories developed by Foucault and Lacan, she writes that “the conscious dimension of speech takes the form of a statement, while the unconscious is signaled in enunciation.”88 In fact, Fortun does not deal strictly with speech acts made by different participants, although much of her data consist of publications, documents, statements, and testimonies. Organizing practices also constitute enunciations, like how the Bhopal Gas-Affected Women Workers' Union comes together for weekly meetings to hear speeches about their cause, share a meal, and socialize in a public park. To better understand what I found to be a complicated set of ideas and practices, I looked at how prior studies emphasize different aspects of the theoretical framework as they try to represent enunciatory communities in their domain of research, beyond the work on double binds that I discuss above. Some focus on the fluidity of enunciatory communities, which are neither fixed nor polarized as people position and reposition themselves.89 Although most prior works agree that enunciatory communities don't pre-exist the circumstances that call them into being, 87 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 13. 88 Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 362. 89 Jenrose Dawn Fitzgerald, “Citizens, Experts and the Economy: The Grassroots Takeover of Kentucky’s Agricultural Future” (PhD, Troy, NY, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2005); Sonia Grant, “The Kalamazoo River Spill: Pipelines, Politics, and Economies of Knowledge” (Master of Arts, Toronto, ON, University of Toronto, 2014), https://hdl.handle.net/1807/67911; Laurie Anne Fedie Moberg, “Fluid Landscapes: Materializing the Future on Thailand’s Flooded Rivers” (PhD, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota, 2018), https://hdl.handle.net/11299/225889. 21 https://hdl.handle.net/11299/225889 https://hdl.handle.net/1807/67911 Nzinga illustrates how existing enunciatory communities – advocating against mass incarceration and the war on drugs and to strengthen the social safety net for poor people – provided a foundation for the formation of new communities around arts-based advocacy in post-Katrina New Orleans.90 Kenner argues that double binds transform extant communities of practice – “how different groups of people produce and share knowledge; mobilize around social, political, environmental, or health problems; and are impacted by advances in science and technology” – into enunciatory communities.91 Some writers engage closely with the future-orientedness of advocacy by the enunciatory communities they study. For example, Lord describes how communities in post-hurricane Galveston, Texas, evoke “dreamworlds” of rebuilding a better infrastructure after disaster.92 Grant describes forms of advocacy that are about preventing future disaster, in response to both acute events – that are widely recognized as disaster – as well as forms of slow violence, which are not widely acknowledged.93 Multiple studies emphasize the necessity of difference within enunciatory communities to move advocacy forward.94 In fact, Wolf-Meyer argues that material practices that exclude difference actually foreclose the possibility of articulating a future ethics.95 90 Fari Nzinga, “Exit the Matrix, Enter the System: Capitalizing on Black Culture to Create and Sustain Community Institutions in Post-Katrina New Orleans” (PhD, Durham, NC, Duke University, 2013), https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8229. 91 Alison Marie Kenner, “Breathtaking: Contemporary Figures of U.S. Asthma Care” (PhD, Troy, NY, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2011), 13. 92 Jerry Joseph Lord, Jr., “The Charging of the Flood: A Cultural Analysis of the Impact and Recovery from Hurricane Ike in Galveston, Texas” (PhD, Austin, TX, The University of Texas at Austin, 2011), http://hdl.handle.net/2152/14780. 93 Sonia Grant, “Securing Tar Sands Circulation: Risk, Affect, and Anticipating the Line 9 Reversal,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2014): 1019–35, https://doi.org/10.1068/d13144p. 94 Timothy K. Choy, “Articulated Knowledges: Environmental Forms after Universality’s Demise,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 1 (March 2005): 5–18, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.1.005; Jeannette Simmonds, “Community Matters: A History of Biological Nitrogen Fixation and Nodulation Research, 1965 to 1995” (PhD, Troy, NY, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2007), https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13015/3930; Matthew Clay Watson, “Assembling the Ancient: Public Science in the Decipherment of Maya Hieroglyphs” (PhD, Gainesville, FL, University of Florida, 2010), https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0042044/00001/images; Callahan, “Complexities of Collaboration.” 95 Matthew Wolf-Meyer, “The Politics of Materiality, or ‘The Left Is Always Late,’” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 29, no. 2 (November 2006): 254–75. 22 https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0042044/00001/images https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13015/3930 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.1.005 https://doi.org/10.1068/d13144p http://hdl.handle.net/2152/14780 https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8229 1.3.3. Enunciatory communities, archives, and records Several works in and around the field of archives and records have taken up the concepts of enunciatory communities and/or double binds. Harper studies enunciatory communities that emerge from the question of how tourism, public memorials, and other forms of public remembering should proceed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the secretive site of nuclear weapons development. The concept helps to explain how beliefs about “the hybrid objects of science” connect with other “cosmologies, belief systems, institutions and rituals,” and how to represent such big questions in an exhibit.96 Bell's study of archival slow violence and its impact on the I'ai in Papua New Guinea (introduced above) also takes up the concept of double bind. As archival records become inaccessible through neglect, community members now try to achieve recognition of their land claims through a “proliferation of documents – clan membership lists, memos, letters – circulating as hand- and machine-made copies” and other “creative archival practices” for piecing evidence together.97 The double bind in which archival conditions place them also leads to hoarding and competition around knowledge that had traditionally been relational, as community members hope to leverage access to that knowledge as evidence of resource claims. Circumstances offer an impossible choice between retaining land claims and sustaining traditional knowledge practices. Pattillo et al. demonstrate that ostensibly efficient archival processing approaches can actually accrue significant technical debt, ultimately proving to be more costly to archives and archivists.98 Using five case studies of digitizing and describing archival material for online 96 Janice Harper, “Another Roadside Attraction? Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” Anthropology in Action 12, no. 3 (October 2005): 48. 97 Bell, “Dystopian Realities,” 21, 23. 98 Rebecca Pattillo et al., “Digital Double Bind: Exploring the Impact of More Product, Less Process (MPLP) on Digital Collections” (Digital Library Federation 2019 Forum, Tampa, FL, 2019). 23 access, they argue that accessibility and efficiency are each desirable outcomes but actually impossible to reconcile with one another – a double bind. The labor-intensive due diligence required to understand user needs and assess archivists' own assumptions often reveals aspects of digital archival work that can't be known or resolved, much less streamlined. Fortun et al. build on the enunciatory communities framework to develop a rubric for scoping what they call “civic community archives.”99 These are websites where users can deposit or find ethnographic data, analyze them together, and publish outcomes. The rubric is a set of questions for defining communities and establishing guidelines for what belongs in the archive, how it will be managed, and for how long. The paper seems to reinvent already-existing practices in archives and digital preservation, but it's nonetheless interesting to see how the originator of “enunciatory communities” has come to participate in archival practices. The authors point to different and perhaps unreconcilable definitions of terms like “data” and “archive” as examples of double binds in what they're trying to accomplish. Writing about archival advocacy and organizing tends to emphasize shared values and interests, or to assume that archival workers as a group share interpretive frameworks and political commitments. Archivists, the argument goes, need to convince powerful others that these values and frameworks are valid, or at least entitle our organizations to funding.100 Although few archival workers specifically engage the concept of enunciatory communities, several have addressed instances of irreconcilable complexity within the archives field. One notable example is Winn's account of facilitating a series of workshops called “Deconstructing 99 Kim Fortun et al., “Civic Community Archiving with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography: Double Binds and Design Challenges,” in HCII 2021: Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing, ed. Matthias Rauterberg (9th International Conference, C&C 2021, Held as Part of the 23rd HCI International Conference, HCII 2021, Virtual Conference: Springer, Cham, 2021), 36–55, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3. 100For a wealth of examples in this vein, see Kathleen D. Roe, Advocacy and Awareness for Archivists (Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists, 2019). 24 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3 Whiteness in Archives.”101 She finds that the ethical injunction to influence archival workers towards cultural competence, and the responsibility to center and attribute the expertise of queer and trans people of color, become contradictory and irreconcilable because white archivists are more likely to accept and attend workshops by another white archivist. In this example of oscillating between equally desirable outcomes, unable to resolve the two because of a third message or constraint, we can see the kind of knotty problem that brings archival workers into enunciatory communities in some times and places. Building on this prior work, my study of archival workers as climate advocates interrupts “common sense” about double-bind situations and advocacy responses. Naming the double binds and analyzing how they work, rather than accepting them as natural or inevitable, is a necessary step towards refusing their logics. Refusal, in turn, makes possible multiple, kinetic, and generative forms of advocacy on the big questions facing archival workers. 1.4. How to read this dissertation The chapters of the dissertation describe the theoretical framework and methodology for this project, followed by three studies that develop from the methodology and inform one another. They can be read in any order. Each attempts to answer the same set of broad questions about past, current, and future relationships between archival workers and climate change: • How do archival workers engage with climate, ecology, and environment? ◦ How do slow violence and double binds shape these engagements? • What are these archival workers’ norms and expectations for making change? ◦ To what extent and in what ways do they act in community? 101Samantha R. Winn, “Radical Empathy in Peer Education: A Case Study on Deconstructing Whiteness,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2: Radical Empathy in Archival Practice (2021), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.129. 25 https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.129 In this chapter, I've laid out the theoretical foundations for the research. The second chapter explains its methodological grounding and how I operationalize the research questions. In the third chapter, I critically review what more than six decades of scholarly and professional productions – articles, presentations, podcasts, and more – indicate have been the impacts of climate, environment, and ecology on archives and records workers’ experiences, practices, and perspectives. In the fourth chapter, I analyze how climate, environment, and ecology shape archives and records practices in seven climate fiction narratives. Climate fiction refers to “literary works that describe the impact of anthropogenic climate change.”102 Whiteley et al. describe the genre as “a cultural response to mostly scientific and policy discourses that offers a way of exploring dramatic social change through the perspectives of individual and social group experiences by way of fictional narrative.”103 Studying archival matters in these texts can illuminate many of the concerns that shape present-day record keeping and preoccupy today’s archivists. The fifth chapter reports findings of an interview study eliciting the perspectives and experiences of 13 archives and records workers already engaging in action on climate change. Together, we identify relationships and flows of power that shape contemporary intersections between archiving, record keeping, and climate change, grounded in the experiences of archival workers concerned about climate. In these interviews, I learn from participants’ backgrounds and approaches to archives, recognizing that climate-related concerns are inextricably entangled with how they enter and make their way in the field. Slow violence – too much work with too few resources, and experiences of climate disaster – sensitize archival workers as climate advocates, 102Rebecca Evans, “Fantastic Futures? Cli-Fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4, no. 2-3: Environmental Futurity (Spring-Fall 2017): 96. 103Andrea Whiteley, Angie Chiang, and Edna Einsiedel, “Climate Change Imaginaries? Examining Expectation Narratives in Cli-Fi Novels,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 36, no. 1 (2016): 28. 26 while also placing them in double binds: trying to pursue principled work in conditions that prevent them from doing so, and advocating from both inside and outside of the field. They come together as an enunciatory community in response to these conditions through flexible advocacy that faces up to the double binds, seeking solidarity wherever they can find it. I conclude by reading across findings from each empirical and analytical approach to the research questions. The core argument is that forms of slow violence produce double binds that catalyze archival workers into an enunciatory community of climate advocates. My overall approach to this research is that archival workers’ adaptations to climate change and intervention in climate futures must involve actually using the knowledge base that exists, and building power to refuse the double bind. 27 2. A methodology for studying [with] archival workers and climate change 2.1. Futurity, archival studies, workers' inquiry: The research space As Aimee Bahng writes, “the future is an always already occupied space.”104 With this research, I'm trying to describe not only what imaginaries occupy the future and how they do so, but also the mutual influences of imaginaries, material conditions, and actions – a process Bahng names “futurity.”105 This methodological approach certainly matters for studying the material spaces of climate fiction novels as well as what work the texts themselves might do. Importantly, it also matters when mapping the imaginaries, conditions, and actions operating through archives literature and archival workers' experiences, and how these too construct futurity. “Archival research culture” saw a period of rapid growth and methods diversification beginning around 1990, with multi-method, interdisciplinary approaches becoming common by the end of the decade.106 Participating in such an archival research culture entails a commitment to interdisciplinarity. It means recognizing that research happens in multiple communities of practice, including in academia and through different kinds of archival work. Although often taking a pragmatic approach – testing the truth claims of knowledge through practice – the archival research culture that Gilliland and McKemmish describe generally promotes a reflexive research praxis rather than handing down one-way solutions or devaluing theory. The research space for this dissertation includes those decades of multi-method investigation, as well as a 104Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 12. 105Bahng writes, “I use the term 'futurity' to highlight the construction of the future and denaturalize its singularity, while maintaining an emphasis on how narrative constructions of the future play a significant role in materializing the present.” Bahng, Migrant Futures, 2. 106Anne Gilliland and Sue McKemmish, “Building an Infrastructure for Archival Research,” Archival Science 4 (2004): 149–97, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-6742-6; Livia Iacovino, “Multi-Method Interdisciplinary Research In Archival Science: The Case Of Recordkeeping, Ethics And Law,” Archival Science 4 (2004): 267– 86, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-005-2595-7. 28 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-005-2595-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-6742-6 more recent articulation of critical archival studies as “those approaches that (1) explain what is unjust with the current state of archival research and practice, (2) posit practical goals for how such research and practice can and should change, and/or (3) provide the norms for such critique.”107 This study proposes norms for making changes, as well as norms for criticism. Related to matters of goals, norms, and futurity, I consider this project to be a kind of long- running workers' inquiry. In such an approach, investigation develops from the basis of workers' knowledge of their material conditions, and inquiry is an element in organizing workers.108 Inquiry includes but isn’t limited to what readers might recognize as research. Keys to the current inquiry include ongoing study, analysis, activism, dialogue, and information sharing among archival workers concerned about a broad array of matters related to climate and environment (see chapters 3 and 5). Some of these contributions and communications take place in scholarly forums, while others ferment and foment through advocacy networks like Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change).109 As an archival worker myself, I extend the research space for this dissertation to include how I've experienced, understood, and 107Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T.-Kay Sangwand, “Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (June 27, 2017): 2. 108Haider and Mohandesi write in an intellectual and political history of workers' inquiry: “This practice of workers’ inquiry, then, implied a certain connection between proletarian knowledge and proletarian politics. Socialists would begin by learning from the working class about its own material conditions. Only then would they be able to articulate strategies, compose theories, and draft programs. Inquiry would therefore be the necessary first step in articulating a historically appropriate socialist project. The practice of disseminating the inquiry also represented a step towards organizing this project, by establishing direct links with workers.” Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi, “Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 27, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy/. For an example of library workers' inquiry, see: Ben Webster, “Notes of a Library Worker,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 25, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/notes-of-a-library-worker/. 109I signed up to volunteer with Project ARCC the summer after my first year of library school, at the end of my first year working in an archives, although ultimately I was barely involved. My introductory blog post for the group's website is a little wide-eyed and not particularly urgent, but it also contains some of the seeds for the research I present here. Amy Wickner, “Getting Started with ProjectARCC: A Student Perspective,” Project ARCC: Archivists Responding to Climate Change (blog), July 16, 2015, https://projectarcc.org/2015/07/16/getting-started-with-projectarcc-a-student-perspective/. 29 https://projectarcc.org/2015/07/16/getting-started-with-projectarcc-a-student-perspective/ https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/notes-of-a-library-worker/ https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy/ misunderstood my own working conditions over the last 14 years.110 The terms research, study, inquiry, and advocacy apply in equal measure. I use a broad definition of “archival worker” that encompasses people doing archives, records, data, and memory work in and out of (and in response to) different organizational contexts and organizing formations; whether selling their labor for wages, working for free, or holding other relationships to the work. The point is to recognize the real-life multitude of roles and practices.111 I do draw lines around certain kinds of research, arguments, and practices in the critical literature review (chapter 3) and study of climate fiction (chapter 4), which I describe in more detail below. In an interview study with archival workers (chapter 5), I follow the lead of participants as they self-identify as archival workers and establish the boundaries of their own archival practice(s). In the following section, I explain the questions, assumptions, prior work, and other considerations that shaped my choice of methods within the research space. 110Some of this political education comes through in research outputs by groups to which I've belonged, including the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Working Group on Labor, Collective Responsibility, and the Archival Workers Emergency Fund / Archival Workers Collective organizing committee. See for instance: DLF Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries, “Research Agenda: Valuing Labor in Digital Libraries,” DLF Wiki, 2018, https://wiki.diglib.org/Labor/Valuing-Labor/Research-Agenda; Sandy Rodriguez et al., “Collective Responsibility: Seeking Equity for Contingent Labor in Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” July 30, 2019, https://osf.io/m6gn2/; “Collective Responsibility Labor Advocacy Toolkit,” accessed December 28, 2023, https://toolkit.dobetterlabor.com/; Lydia Tang et al., “Summer 2020 Archival Workers Emergency Fund Survey Summary,” Archival Workers Emergency Fund (blog), November 10, 2020, https://awefund.wordpress.com/2020/11/10/summer-2020-archival-workers-emergency-fund-survey-summary/; Courtney Dean et al., “AWE Fund Winter 2020 Survey Summary,” Archival Workers Emergency Fund (blog), July 28, 2021, https://awefund.wordpress.com/2021/07/28/awe-fund-winter-2020-survey-summary/; Courtney Dean et al., “Archival Workers Collective 2022 Survey Summary,” Archival Workers Emergency Fund (blog), April 17, 2023, https://awefund.wordpress.com/2023/04/17/archival-workers-collective-2022-survey-summary/. 111For instance, the academic archives where I've been employed since 2014 relies on the efforts of paid staff and faculty in at least six job classifications (none of which is Archivist), volunteers, student workers in multiple categories, short- and long-term interns (both paid and unpaid), library workers of different kinds in non-archives departments, community members and organizations continually involved in building and interpreting collections, and donors and their associates who participate to various degrees in appraising and organizing material before and after it enters archival custody. Unpacking the categories of “archivist” and “archival worker,” which even critical archival studies sometimes black-box, shows the complexity of power relations within even one workplace. 30 https://awefund.wordpress.com/2023/04/17/archival-workers-collective-2022-survey-summary/ https://awefund.wordpress.com/2021/07/28/awe-fund-winter-2020-survey-summary/ https://awefund.wordpress.com/2020/11/10/summer-2020-archival-workers-emergency-fund-survey-summary/ https://toolkit.dobetterlabor.com/ https://osf.io/m6gn2/ https://wiki.diglib.org/Labor/Valuing-Labor/Research-Agenda 2.2. Questions, assumptions, choices: The methods and prior work This dissertation seeks to answer several questions: • How do archival workers engage with climate, ecology, and environment? ◦ How do slow viole