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Equitable Archival Practice at Kennedy Library

Glossary

Critical Archival Studies - an archival framework introduced by Michelle Caswell to critically engage with archival practice within a broader sociopolitical context.

White Supremacy - the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races” (Merriam-Webster)

Predominantly White Institution (PWI) - an institution of learning whose student population is majority White-identitified.

Intersectionality - the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups” (Merriam-Webster)

Systemic Racism - “A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist” (The Aspen Institute)

Person-first Language - sentence phrasing that places a person before the identities they hold, in order to center the person as the subject of the sentence.

Reparative Archive - n. “remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people in the data created or used by archivists to identify or characterize archival resources” (Dictionary of Archives Terminology)

Communal Archive - n. “documentation of a group of people that share common interests, and social, cultural and historical heritage, usually created by members of the group being documented and maintained outside of traditional archives” (Dictionary of Archives Terminology)