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Happy #AskAnArchivistDay from The Feminist Institute!

Allison Elliott Oct 12, 2022 2 Minute Read

Today is #AskAnArchivistDay! We’re so glad to have your readership and would like to celebrate today by shedding light on what it is we do as a feminist archive. TFI is building a free, digital archive of feminist contributions to culture - from art, literature, nightlife, business, politics and social contributions. So far, we have archived the work of acclaimed feminist artists such as Mary Beth Edelson, and incredible projects like supersisters Trading Cards, Addresses Project & more. We want to provide easier access to feminist work as part of our commitment to information activism.
Hand-made invite. On the left, there are two women with short hair cuddling. On the right, there's text describing the details of the event.
Handmade invites for Sundays at Café Tabac party. Ephemera from Addresses Project. Image courtesy of Wanda Acosta

The Feminist Institute is committed to continuing our collection and preservation of feminist history, and sharing it with our followers! To do this, we’ll be adding new episodes to our series, Alive in the Archive, where we interview notable feminists on the importance of amplifying gender-marginalized voices by exploring personal archiving as a feminist act.

We’ll also be starting a collaborative interview series through TFI Teachers where we speak with peer archives, archivists, memory workers and creators, inspired by #AskAnArchivistDay! It will explore the larger world of archiving and why it’s so important for recording marginalized histories. Specifically, we’ll be looking a lot at community archiving. Community archives hold an important role in preserving marginalized histories that have not been prioritized by mainstream institutions and creating an active record. They challenge what has been typically seen as worth saving, namely ephemera, which can range from t-shirt collections, buttons, pamphlets, fliers, poetry and more.

Through this specialized preservation, a nuanced and captivating picture of history is created. Communities have autonomy over their stories and aren’t pressured to water their stories down to be palatable to mainstream institutions. We want to expose our followers to this important work through these collaborative interviews while providing tools for your own personal and community digital archiving projects!

It’s an experiment in the many untapped uses of archives within education, all while building community with our peers + peer organizations— we hope you’ll join us. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and follow our Instagram so you don’t miss these exciting series!

All ephemera is copyrighted to © The Addresses Project, 2022. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This material was shared with The Addresses Project by the person who is being featured, and if anyone has a copyright claim, they can contact info@thefeministinstitute.org.

This blog post is also available on our Substack.