Living Archives, Living Story: Questions of Ethics, Responsibility, and Sharing

In this essay I would like to think through an uncomfortable moment in my experience of life-writing pedagogy and its aftermath. This moment was inflected by my own practice as a life writer, highlighting for me the pressures and desires that attend teaching life writing or sharing aspects of another’s story. I discuss visualization as a writing technique and describe facilitating life writing in a community space, outside of state or educational institutions, where such institutions are often perceived and experienced as predatory, and I revisit the importance of protocols to ensure participants’ safety, including gatekeeping of the material produced. I consider an alternative view by a participant about sharing her stories. In 2019, I was part of a collaborative project with Malaysia Design Archive, consisting of workshops that guided participants through visual analysis, the exploration of non-state and activist archives, the politics of knowledge production, and narrative-making using personal objects.1 Inspired by an earlier Malaysia Design Archive project, “Living Library: Stories of Strength and Resistance,”2 we proposed “Living Archives” as a way to re-imagine archives and archival practices with Malaysian activists, artists, curators, and researchers, many from minority communities. Interaction with personal objects (beads, pamphlets, family photographs, a feathered headdress) over two and a half days of intensive workshops encouraged the participants to explore what an archive could be (physical, embodied, or ephemeral), who gets to narrate an archive, and to imagine the alternative lives of objects or imaginary archives.3 In Malaysia, censorship of alternative narratives and interpretations of both contemporary and historical or archival material is used to control tightly an authoritarian-capitalist-religious narrative of nation.4 Our project aligned with Malaysia Design Archive’s mission as an independent community archive and site of “digital undercommons” that seeks to document Malaysia’s design history and foster an ethos of research and history from below.5 Situated in the creative enclave of the Zhongshan https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2154449