AACAT Framework & Method: 

African American Community Archives (AACAT) are participatory knowledge ecosystems in which Black communities engage in the collection, preservation, and dissemination of their cultural patrimony through community-driven methodologies that prioritize collective agency, Indigenous epistemologies, and decolonized archival praxis (Keeton, 2025). Rather than positioning archives as neutral institutional repositories, AACAT centers self-determination, oral tradition, embodied knowledge, and relational stewardship as foundational archival practices.

AACAT reframes archives as sites of resistance, healing, and cultural continuity. Within this framework, communities are not subjects of documentation; they are stewards of their own memory and historical record.

AACAT as Project Framework:

In Our Own Words is grounded in this community archival praxis. Decolonial archival scholarship demonstrates that traditional archival systems emerged alongside colonial state formation and privileged institutional authority over lived experience (Ghaddar & Caswell, 2019). Community archives scholarship challenges this model by prioritizing self-representation and relational accountability (Caswell, 2017, 2021).

Drawing from AACAT, the project treats narrative testimony as archival record. Rather than supplementing institutional archives, it repositions narrative authority within the community itself. Participants speak in their own language and interpret their own professional experiences, contributing to a participatory and community-authored archive.

Scholarship on embodied records further supports this framework. Sutherland (2019) argues for expanded definitions of record-ness that recognize oral, gestural, and embodied knowledge as legitimate archival materials. This conceptual shift is central to the project’s design.

Autoethnography as Method:

Autoethnography serves as the methodological approach of the project. Participants engage in reflective, first-person narration that situates individual experience within broader institutional and professional contexts. Through guided but open-ended prompts, contributors interpret their own histories, labor, and identities within librarianship.

The project also incorporates curator reflexivity, acknowledging that archival creation is never neutral. By combining AACAT as a method, In Our Own Words operationalizes community-centered archival praxis.