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“It Feels Like a Life’s Work” : Recordkeeping as an Act of Love Douglas, Jennifer L.; Alisauskas, Alexandra
Abstract
By considering a set of in-depth interviews with eight bereaved mothers, this article seeks to explore ideas about what records are and what they do. Working to centre the voices and experiences of the bereaved mothers, the article first discusses some of the objects, events, places, and bodily traces they identified that function as records. It next considers the roles records and recordkeeping played for the parents interviewed, identifying four types of records work: proving life and love, parenting, continuing a relationship, and imagining. Records and recordkeeping are shown to be instrumental in the ongoing processing of traumatic loss as well as in the significant work of ensuring a life has meaning and is acknowledged. Finally, the interviews with parents also showed how deeply imbricated are love and grief as emotions and as motivations for recordkeeping, and the article ends by articulating a call for archivists to learn to “look with love.”
Item Metadata
Title |
“It Feels Like a Life’s Work” : Recordkeeping as an Act of Love
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Creator | |
Publisher |
Association of Canadian Archivists (Canada)
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Date Issued |
2021-06-03
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Description |
By considering a set of in-depth interviews with eight bereaved
mothers, this article seeks to explore ideas about what records are and what
they do. Working to centre the voices and experiences of the bereaved mothers,
the article first discusses some of the objects, events, places, and bodily traces
they identified that function as records. It next considers the roles records
and recordkeeping played for the parents interviewed, identifying four types
of records work: proving life and love, parenting, continuing a relationship,
and imagining. Records and recordkeeping are shown to be instrumental in
the ongoing processing of traumatic loss as well as in the significant work of
ensuring a life has meaning and is acknowledged. Finally, the interviews with
parents also showed how deeply imbricated are love and grief as emotions and
as motivations for recordkeeping, and the article ends by articulating a call for
archivists to learn to “look with love.”
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Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
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Date Available |
2021-06-16
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Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
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Rights |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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DOI |
10.14288/1.0398429
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URI | |
Affiliation | |
Citation |
Douglas, Jennifer, and Alexandra Alisauskas. 2021. “‘It Feels Like a Life’s Work’: Recordkeeping As an Act of Love”. Archivaria 91 (June), 6-37.
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Peer Review Status |
Reviewed
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Scholarly Level |
Faculty; Graduate
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Rights URI | |
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
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Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International