The main purpose of our research is to create a new toolkit to support survivor-activists, advocates and archivists to preserve and open up survivor-centred archives.
The research team will collaborate with a group of eight survivor-activists (the ‘Participatory Research Group,’ or PRG) to explore key questions that will shape the toolkit, such as:
- What do we mean by survivor-activism?
- What makes an archive trauma-informed?
- How do we balance privacy and confidentiality with accessibility and openness?
- How do we ensure survivors have agency and consent over their testimonies?
- Who should have responsibility and decision-making power in archives?
Through in-person and online meetings we will discuss these questions with the support of team member and creative practitioner Patricia Debney and the survivor-led research organisation Survivors Voices.
We will test our ideas and assumptions by working on two pilot archives:
- The papers of Rasjidah St. John, a London-based survivor-activist (1980s-2010s) who passed away in 2017
- The archive of the CSASS, the Chester Sexual Abuse Support Service which closed in March 2025 after 30+ years.
These two archives present distinct challenges in terms of their content, size, and sensitivity, which will help the team and the PRG to think about the toolkit from different angles. We will showcase some of their contents and how they have informed the projects in two online exhibitions.
Subsequently, we will create, write, and test the toolkit, publishing it as a resource online in early 2028. We will host a number of workshops with survivors and potential users of the toolkit from late 2027 onwards.