Introduction

A significant portion of archival practice involves working closely with the people who create, use, care for, and are documented in records, but until relatively recently, the archival field has rarely acknowledged in its theory, methodology, and pedagogy the degree to which it is – or should be – person centred. This special issue was conceived as part of an effort to highlight and consolidate developments toward a person-centred theory of archival care and to person-centred approaches to archival practice. We define person-centred approaches in the context of archival theory and praxis broadly, as those that shift attention from the record, where it has traditionally been almost exclusively focused, to the people who create, keep, use, and are represented in records. It is important to us to acknowledge that person-centred archival theory and praxis are not altogether new. We do not claim to be the first archival studies scholars to explore ideas about the person at the heart of records and recordkeeping practices, nor do we wish to erase or downplay the work of professional archivists and records managers who have been actively working to respond to the needs of the people who create, use, and are represented in records. Exploring the concept of “firsting” in theory building and academic inquiry, Lauren Beck positions it as “the process through which a scholar presents an act, circumstance, or phenomenon generated by [a hu]man, or accomplishment to have occurred for the first time.” Max Liboiron describes firsting as endemic in academia, where students are trained to “stake out” their research areas and “claim” their territory. As Liboiron points out, these metaphors are rooted in coloniality. Firsting is a form of terra nullius. It presumes that nothing came before, and it effaces localized ways of knowing and building meaning. Many of the ways we talk about information in Western contexts – concepts of access, discovery, and innovation – are likewise inherently rooted in coloniality. For example, scholars critical of Western systems of knowledge attribution have tied conversations about intellectual ownership and novelty to the colonial treatment of land and title. We are mindful of the editorial and scholarly urge to proclaim newness or to “stake a claim” to the term person centred. Our aim is instead to bring together a varied corpus of work that explores different ways of centring people in archives and records work in order to understand commonalities and differences in approaches and to bring person-centred theories and approaches into deliberate conversation with each other. Our hope is that this special issue can provide some framing for understanding – and continuing to explore and extend – what constitutes, or could constitute, person-centred archival theory and practice. As part of this framing, we consider how archivists and archival scholars have already begun to centre people. Although the term person centred (or human centred) has only recently been used to describe archival approaches, the archival studies literature has, for the last decade especially, seen a tremendous shift in emphasis toward the people who participate in making, keeping, and using records and those who are impacted by these actions. Person- centred approaches are evident in and across recent archival scholarship, especially scholarship related to personal and community archives and in scholarship that draws on Indigenous, queer, feminist, anti-racist, anti- and de-colonial, and disability studies. This body of work explores ideas about symbolic annihilation, radical empathy, affect, the body and embodiment, and ethics of care (and this is not an exhaustive or mutually exclusive list). Person-centred approaches are also evident in archival practices that centre the perspectives of individuals …