by Sarah Glassford
The CNHH is pleased to announce that a peer-reviewed article relating some of its members’ experiences engaging with communities and organizations around issues of humanitarian archives is now available to read in Issue 256 of the Revue internationale des études du développement.
“Creating Development Archives Ethically from an Over-Developed Country” appears in a special issue dealing with development archives around the world. The article is available online and open access at: https://journals.openedition.org/ried/23482.
Co-written by David Webster, Dominique Marshall, Chris Trainor, Sarah Glassford, and Eve Dutil, the article grew out of a thought-provoking roundtable sponsored by the CNHH at the 2023 conference of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA).
The roundtable, which was chaired by Glassford (Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections, University of Windsor), featured a lively discussion between Marshall (Department of History, Carleton University), Webster (Department of History & Global Studies, Bishop’s University), Trainor (MacOdrum Library Archives & Special Collections, Carleton University), Melanie Oppenheimer (Emeritus professor, Flinders University), and Fabrice Weissman (Centre de réflexion sur l’action et les savoirs humanitaires, Médecins sans frontières), on a wide array of issues facing scholars and practitioners who engage with archives of development and humanitarianism.
The discussion raised many points the participants were keen to explore further, and a subsequent call for papers from the Revue offered the opportunity to do so. Marshall, Glassford, Trainor, and Webster were joined by Dutil (formerly Bishop’s University, now a graduate student at Carleton University) in co-writing the paper, while Oppenheimer and Weissman graciously granted permission for their roundtable insights to be used as needed.
The result is an article that grapples with where the primary sources documenting humanitarian action end up archived, how, and by whom. It also highlights the direct work of the CNHH and its individual members in helping to preserve and make those primary sources available for future generations – work of which this network can be justly proud. Additionally, the composition of both the original roundtable and the resulting article’s team of co-authors offers yet another example of the CNHH’s commitment to bringing together scholars and practitioners, and the positive results that can come from those encounters.
As an affiliated committee of the CHA, the CNHH has an annual opportunity to sponsor a traditional panel of research papers or a roundtable like the 2023 one, as part of the CHA conference. If you have a theme or idea in the area of humanitarian or development history, around which you would like to organize a panel or roundtable, consider reaching out to the CNHH at aidhistory.canada@gmail.com, or by individually contacting one of the Steering Committee members (*whose contact information is available in the Members section of the CNHH website). It’s a great chance to link your individual research to a broader conversation, and to tap into the network the CNHH has built.
Dr. Sarah Glassford is an archivist at the Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections, with responsibility for community collections. She is also a social historian of modern Canada, the author of Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), and a founding member of the CNHH.
