This session will explore the constitution of a new archive of humanitarian records and how historians develop a synchronous way of engaging with very contemporary sources they are helping to preserve and archive.
The event will include a presentation by the Humanitarian Archivist, Flora Chatt, on ‘The purpose of the archive’. This discussion will be devoted to the development of an archive’s purpose in collecting material. It will set out how gaps are identified and retrospectively filled in both archives that are not in current use and ‘live’ collections of records. We will discuss the effect of engagement with historical research and specific projects on an archive, and how this proactiveness contrasts with the traditional view of the archivist as a passive and neutral figure. This talk will also involve a collections encounter with some relevant objects from the humanitarian archive.
This will be followed by a discussion of historical work undertaken using these archives and other similar archival deposits. These presentations by the team of the Developing Humanitarian Medicine Wellcome Project will reflect on the challenges presented by using very contemporary sources and the positionality questions a synchronous historical method entails. Dr Maria Cullen will discuss ‘Working in Humanitarian Archives: Oxfam and MSF’ which will contrast publicly accessible archives deposited in public archives and private archives open to researchers. There will be a discussion about how private institutions have processes and how preservation takes place. The paper will consider what these institutional archives can tell us and their silences. In particular, it reflects upon the difficulty of finding traces of the beneficiaries in institutional archives which tend to de-humanize recipients of aid. It also discusses oral history and how it can complement these deposits.
Dr Janelle Winters will reflect on her experience working as a historian embedded in an ongoing medical research project during COVID-19. As the ‘trial historian’ for the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit’s ‘COPCOV’ trial – a randomised-controlled trial testing the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in preventing COVID-19 in eleven countries – she has been attending trial meetings, conducting stakeholder interviews across trial sites in Southeast Asia and Africa, and compiling project documents. Her talk will provide perspectives on the differences between ‘semi-structured’ and ‘oral history’ interviews in the context of contemporary global history. It will also present ethical (and legal) challenges for conducting interviews during ongoing health emergencies and ‘archiving’ vast collections of digital sources.
Professor Bertrand Taithe will reflect on ‘Developing operational archives with humanitarians’. This talk will discuss how humanitarians and historians can collaborate in new archival policies and the development of record keeping closest to the field and seek to address major archiving gaps in humanitarian work. This paper will draw on work done in Cambodia and Malawi with MSF including setting up operational archives and conducting oral history interviews. The presentation will conclude on how the new archive feeds historical reflections while also reflecting research priorities.
This event is a collaboration between the Developing Humanitarian Medicine Wellcome funded project and the John Rylands Research Institute and Library.