Two members of the project team, Victoria and Alana, have a new article published in Archives and Records, a journal for archivists and historians, titled “Archival debts, high stakes, and intersubjectivities in trauma-informed approaches to archives of child sexual abuse.” It is part of a special issue on trauma-informed archiving.
They wrote it together in the spring/summer of 2025, just after we heard that Remembering Together had been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The article reflects on two earlier archival projects that inspired our thinking and approach: Victoria’s work with the personal papers of Rasjidah St. John (1929-2017), a London-based survivor-activist, and Alana’s now-concluded ‘live’ archiving of LOUDfence UK, a ‘craftivism’ healing movement for survivors of child sexual abuse in religious settings. These projects raised vital questions about how to work ethically and practically with survivor-activist archives, especially around consent and accessibility. Alana and Victoria use the recently published article to explore how we might approach these issues in trauma-informed and survivor-centred ways. They argue that there is an ‘archival debt’ owed to survivors, and that the archiving of child sexual abuse survivor-activism has ‘high stakes’ - this means that while it comes with risks and difficult challenges, the benefits and possibilities are significant. These ideas are foundational to the work we will do over the next two years.
The article is published in an academic journal and so is behind a paywall unless you are a member of a university or library that has access. However, we are able to provide a free PDF to anyone who would like one. Please email us at remember-together-project@york.ac.uk.