Archives primarily contain records about refugees rather than by refugees, while news media and political discourse often frame displacement through dehumanizing metaphors and crisis spectacle. This article examines how participatory digital archives can intervene in these representational regimes. Focusing on The Amplification Project—a community-led archive of displacement-related art—I theorize collective interventionist archiving as collaborative work that leverages digital archives to disrupt dominant frames and shift the terms through which refugee lives are represented. Through analysis of the archive’s founding, both relationship-based and crowdsourced collection development, and circulation practices, I demonstrate how such archives create infrastructure for encountering refugeedom on terms other than crisis news or platformed outrage, while confronting constraints, including partial visibility, hostile publics, and unequal digital access.
Articles by Kathy Carbone
Kathy Carbone is an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute's School of Information and co-leads the Data Storytelling Lab, a teaching lab focused on best practices in data storytelling and visualization. She is also co-founder, director, and archivist of The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action, a participatory, community-led archive. Her research and practice integrate contemporary art and critical archival studies, exploring archives and archival practices as tools and methods for expressive resistance, fostering solidarity, and community building through collaborative preservation of contemporary artworks. Previously, she taught at UCLA and CalArts and was a scholar on the UCLA/Queens College Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Initiative for several years. Before joining Pratt, Carbone served as the CalArts Institute Archivist and Performing Arts Librarian for over a decade, as the director and librarian of the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center Library in Kigali, Rwanda, and as the Public Services/Outreach Manager of the Willoughby-Eastlake Public Library System. Her publications appear in Archivaria, Archives and Records, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, The International Journal of Human Rights, Curator: The Museum Journal, Archival Science, perhaps magazine, and Journal of Documentation.