Capturing social movements: Web archiving needs of activist collections in 'The North'

This thesis explores activist-archivists’ experiences of and attitudes towards web archiving in the context of digitally enabled social movements focusing on archives in post-industrial cities in northern Britain. Activist-archives were created to confront the ‘archival silences’ in official records (Caswell, 2014); the increased use of digital media throughout the life cycle of campaigns (Treré, 2018) creates a need for activist-archivists to engage with web archiving to ensure these silences do not resurface in web archives. My research questions addressed: How the use of digital media by social movements affects the way activist archives are documenting them; how activist archivists anticipate their archive collections being accessed and used by their communities; the ways in which activist archivists currently engage with web archiving; whether activist archivists see a need for activist web content to be archived; the kinds of barriers these archives experience with regards to archiving the web; and concerns activist archivists have about where activist web content is currently being archived.
Working within an interpretivist postmodern feminist research paradigm, I conducted qualitative ethnographic research via semi-structured interviews and elicited diaries. Between March 2021 and January 2022, I conducted twenty interviews with sixteen activists-archivists from feminist, anarchist, race equality, queer rights, and working-class collections. I also interviewed four archives sector professionals involved in supporting community archives. Seven participants wrote themed diaries which were combined with interview data and analysed using Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis (2022).
None of the activist-archivists were archiving the web due to a lack of resources including time, skills, and funds. They did, however, recognise the internet’s embeddedness in contemporary protest culture and the value in capturing activist web-content to support their missions in reclaiming absent or misrepresented narratives, informing present and future activism, democratising access to information, and archives as evidence for holding authorities to account. They felt a need for more visible and tailored mechanisms of support in amateur web archiving, either in terms of peer-to-peer networks or strengthening existing infrastructures of support. Participants from anarchist-archives also raised concerns around the safety of their communities and archives: they felt that the increased visibility of hosting a web archive could put them at risk of negative attention from law enforcement or alt-right groups.
By focusing on the experiences of amateur archivists, this research offers novel insights regarding the barriers of top-down participatory web archiving efforts, which are typically examined on a macro level. Existing literature in critical archive studies on the archival turn in activism largely deals with the phenomenon in relation to feminist and queer archives in the US, my research deepens our understanding through include under-researched communities, namely black and working-class movements. Finally, this project contributes to the burgeoning field of political memory work emphasising the potential for archivists to have an active role in the shaping and sustainability of social movements.