Archiving Resistance History

Archives & Collections

• Archive/Counter-Archive: project on Canadian audiovisual archives created by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities.

• Barnard Zine Library

• Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research (Columbia University)

• Chronicling Resistance (Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries)

• Freedom Archives: houses over 10, 000 hours of audio and video recordings documenting social justice movements locally, nationally, and internationally, from 1960s to the present

• Global Events Web Archiving

• Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change

• Independent Voices: Open Access Collection of Alternative Press

• Interference Archives: archive of social movements in Brooklyn, NY 

• Joseph A. Labadie Collection on the History of Social Protest Movements and Marginalized Political Communities (University of Michigan)

• Librarians and Archivists with Palestine

• Radical Archives: NYC conference on "threads of radical archival practice: Archives and Absence, or lost and counter-archives; Archives and Affect, or embodied archives; Archives and Ethics, or stealing from and for archives; and Archive as Constellation, or archive as method, medium, and interface."

• Reminisce Preservation

• Speaking and Protesting in America

• Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (NYU)

Ongoing Projects

• Actipedia - "...an open-access, community-generated wiki to document, share, and inspire Creative Activism."

• Archives Against History Repeating Itself

• Art of the March

• Baltimore Uprising 2015 Archive Project

• Community-Driven Archives Initiative (Arizona State University)

• Docs Populi

• Documenting Ferguson

• Human Rights Web Archive

• Project STAND: Student Activism Now Documented

• Protest Matters: a people's museum of material culture from protest actions

• #ResistanceMoments project

• Save the Boards (Minneapolis, Minnesota)

• Trump Protest Archive

• Women’s March on Washington Archives Project

• Working Class History

Guides & Resources

• Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video

• Archival Union

• Art Activism Guide

• Disaster Response and Relief

• DocNow

• Five Tips: For Documenting Movements and Donating Materials (Blackivists)

• How to Archive a Protest: Zine by Margaret Lawson, Invisible Histories Project, 2024. (with Memory Work Activities guide)

• Statement on Ethical Acquisition of Campus Protest Materials (Society of American Archivists, Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct, June 5, 2024)

• Witness.org

Books, Articles, & History

• Ford, Ann. "I Will Always Refuse": Civil rights protests in public libraries. americanlibrariesmagazine.org, 1 June 2017.

• McCracken, Krista. "Archives as Activism." activehistory.ca, April 10, 2017.

• Tansey, Eira. "No One Owes Their Trauma to Archivists, or, The Commodification of Contemporaneous Collecting." http://eiratansey.com/, June 5, 2020. 

• Taves Sheffield, Rebekah. Documenting Rebellions: A Study of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives in Queer Times. Litwin Books, 2020. 

• Velte, Ashlyn. "Ethical Challenges and Current Practices in Activist Social Media Archives." The American Archivist, Spring/Summer 2018, Vol. 81, No. 1, pp. 112-134.

Podcasts & Webinars

Dublin, Thomas, Daniel Lewis, and Kathryn Sklar.  "How Does the Past Inform Today?: Key Primary Source Collections for Research in Social Movements." Youtube, uploaded by CHOICE Media Channel, 28 March 2017.