Open Collections

Everly, Alice Zoe

University of British Columbia

New parenthood and the Covid-19 pandemic are both transformative experiences that are reflected in personal records and recordkeeping practices. The growing literature on personal archives recognizes the role of personal records in facilitating relationships and in shaping and documenting personal development; the central role of affect in the creation of records; and the importance of expanding the concept of the record. This project explores the relevancy of these insights in one specific area: recordkeeping by new parents during the pandemic. Through semi-structured interviews and autoethnography, I endeavored to determine how pandemic conditions have interacted with new parents’ urges to record their pregnancies, their births, and their new babies’ early lives; the nature of the records they have kept; and their recordkeeping experiences. My three main foci were maintaining connection with loved ones, seeking social recognition of parenthood, and gaining a sense of control over the passage of time. Because the conditions surrounding both new parenthood and the pandemic tend to transform one’s experience of the passage of time, these conditions create a unique window into how personal recordkeeping interacts with the temporal foundations of the archival concept of the ‘record.’ This project responds to recent critiques and expansions of the concept of the record, providing a detailed analysis of personal recordkeeping practices that do not conform to the clear temporal or personal distinctions that undergird archival theory. This results in a renewal of the archival concept of the record. The creation, sharing, use, and preservation of records by new parents presents a portrait of records and recordkeeping that 1) challenges clear separations between records, creators, custodians, users, and the subjects of records; 2) defies a clear distinction between primary and secondary value; 3) expands the inclusiveness of the concept of a ‘record’; and 4) (by virtue of 1-3) complicates the linear view of time on which mainstream archival theory is founded. My analysis of the recordkeeping practices of new parents in the pandemic allows for both a temporal reconceptualization of the record, and its recognition as an embodied and dynamic entity that is open for reconfiguration with each new activation.

Text

2022-08-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82580

Library, Archival and Information Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/