Aging, Activism, and the Archive: Feminist Perspectives for the 21st Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the process of a collaborative, community-driven initiative to create an archives for the Grandmothers Advocacy Network (GRAN), a national Canadian organization. Based on records, key informant interviews, and the authors’ participation in the process, the article points to two salient limitations in archival scholarship: (1) the existing gap in considering how intergenerational relationships might form around, and potentially shape, collaborative archives; and (2) the scarce attention given to how, by whom, and to what effect older women’s lives and associations are being recorded and represented. From a feminist perspective, an examination of GRAN’s archival process is brought to bear on key debates within scholarship on critical archival praxis, troubling the integrity of the often upheld “alternative versus mainstream” binary, and suggesting that the associated assumptions are overly simplistic. Most significantly, the article reveals that, through archiving, GRAN members are actively staking out their relevance as contemporary social change actors, challenging dominant discourses about older women’s passivity, and insisting on being remembered for their engagement and activism. In the context of population aging that is pervasive, unprecedented, and feminized, their archival work also begs a salient shift in thinking about aging and the archives – moving beyond notions of older people as end-of-life “donors” of records to recognizing their important roles as archives creators and users. RESUME Cet article examine le processus d’une initiative collaborative et communautaire pour constituer les archives du Mouvement de soutien des grands-meres (GRAN), une organisation nationale canadienne. Se basant sur des documents d’archives, sur des entrevues avec des informateurs cles, ainsi que sur la participation meme des auteures au processus, cet article fait ressortir deux contraintes importantes dans la litterature scientifique sur l’archivistique : (1) le manque d’ecrits au sujet des relations intergenerationnelles qui sont formees a partir d’une approche collaborative en archivistique et de leur influence potentielle sur ce processus; et (2) le peu d’attention accordee a la facon dont sont presentees et documentees – ainsi que par qui et a quel effet – les vies de femmes plus âgees et les associations qui les representent. D’un point de vue feministe, un examen des processus archivistiques du GRAN vient ajouter aux debats cles presents dans la litterature scientifique portant sur la praxis archivistique, troublant ainsi l’integrite du concept binaire « alternatif / dominant » souvent soutenu dans ces ecrits, et suggerant donc que les suppositions qui y sont associees sont trop simplistes. De maniere plus significative, cet article revele qu’a partir de l’action d’archiver, les membres du GRAN etablissent leur pertinence comme acteurs contemporains de changement social – allant carrement a l’encontre des discours dominants affirmant la passivite des femmes plus âgees – leur permettant ainsi d’insister qu’on se souvienne d’elles pour leur engagement et leur activisme. Dans le contexte du vieillissement de la population qui s’avere etre extensif, sans precedent et surtout feminin, ce travail d’archivage se veut le plaidoyer d’un changement marque dans la facon de penser le vieillissement en lien avec les archives, allant au-dela de la perception des personnes âgees comme donateurs de documents d’archives a la fin de leur vie, pour reconnaitre leur role important comme createurs et utilisateurs d’archives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".