Preserving Hope: Reanimating Working-Class Writing through (Digital) Archival Co-Creation

Abstract

In this article, I use concepts of provenance, value, and representation to trace how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried to preserve their writing for nearly forty years. Ultimately, their hope for an archive turned into a reality, as they participated in the co-curation of print and digital archives. But each step along the way was met with struggles of labor, finances, and resources. With a focus on materiality and class, I argue that in order to reanimate community literacies digitally, we must also make visible the conditions that allow, exclude, structure, and impede this work. I’d like to tell a story about preservation—about curating digital archives alongside community members in the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, or the FWWCP. The FWWCP was a working-class, community writing and publishing network that began in London in 1976 and spread transnationally until 2007, often bringing together writers who felt marginalized based on their workingclass backgrounds. As one member Roger Mills (2018) noted, “We wrote despite people sneering at us, and we created a community.” Indeed, the FWWCP created a community that was committed to publishing, circulating, and preserving their writing as an act of resistance against people and institutions who dismissed the value of worker writers’ testimony. But, alongside the story of preservation, I need to tell a story about materiality, about the precariousness of building archives with working-class communities when resources are unstable: when there is no archival space, no archivist, little money, and sometimes not even the belief that working-class writing is worthy of publishing, let alone preserving. This story, then, is about an unsettling of which voices get archived, how community members responded to social conditions by advocating for archival curation, and ultimately how community-led actions across decades paved the way for a co-curated digital archive of working-class writing. In this essay, I draw from work in the areas of community literacy, critical archival studies, and workingclass studies to focus on the material factors of co-constructing archives from scratch with FWWCP/FED1 members. Since 2013, I have worked alongside FWWCP/FED members collecting archival documents and publications, and I have led the effort to sort, organize, index, box, digitize, publicize, and create finding aids so their histories are preserved2 ethically and collaboratively. Ultimately, during this partnership, we established the FWWCP Collection at the Trades Union Congress Library in London, housing over 2,350 individual print publications (roughly eighty-five boxes) and more than twenty boxes’ worth of administrative material, including meeting minutes, membership files, mission statements, constitutional documents, letters, and more. When I say we here, I am referring to some previous FWWCP members, the FED Executive Committee, Nick Pollard, Steve Parks, Jeff Howarth, Vincent Portillo and myself who have been part of the intellectual, logistic, and physical work of curation. Beyond the printed FWWCP Collection,