The Agony of Affective Responsibilities in Archives, Library, and Information Studies by Liza Mardoyan

 

The Agony of Affective Responsibilities in Archives, Library, and Information Studies

By Liza Mardoyan

Grief is personal.

Grief is non-quantifiable.

Grief is nonlinear.

Grief manifests in unexpected ways.

Grief may be “suspended.”[1]

Transgenerational trauma.

Prior lived experience.

Binaries are easy; it is the space in between, the shades of gray, that is challenging to occupy and navigate.

Affect, Radical Empathy, Archival imaginaries, Ethics of Care, Hauntology, Displaced Archives, and Silences in Archives – are distinct but interrelated concepts that imbue the current scholarly debates in archival studies, provide theoretical frameworks, and create additional responsibilities to the Library and Information Studies (LIS) professionals.  Some of these concepts have migrated from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology to Information Studies (IS).  LIS is late to the party, but they have arrived thanks to the pioneering works of Michelle Caswell, Anne Gilliland, Marika Cifor, James Lowry, and others.[2]

In her concluding paragraphs, Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez builds upon the four affective shifts in the archives proposed by Caswell and Cifor, and adds a “…fifth relationship, of archivist to archivist, as part of the affective relationships we must manage.”[3] I would even take this one step further and add “self-empathy.” Are we centering the archivist’s self-care first?

Through many readings and a conversation with Prof. Lowry, it seems to me that the onus of carrying out all these affective responsibilities falls on the individual shoulders of the archivist, who sometimes needs to make a difficult professional choice and circumvent standards and rules. Although Caswell and Cifor acknowledge the limitations of radical empathy and provide sound practical solutions by way of asking questions,[4] I argue that once we go into an intimate space, like empathy, can it be taught? Can it be located? Can a feeling be codified?  Should it?

I am thrilled that “ethics of care rooted in radical empathy”[5] is the dialogue in the current theoretical framework and pedagogy in LIS. However, how will this be implemented in praxis against the mounds of archival backlogs? To what end? And at what personal cost? The Caswell-Cifor proposal is a shift in affective thinking. It is related to Joan D. Koss-Chioino’s idea of “radical empathy as a learned process” while training to become a spirit healer. But it also juxtaposes Chiono’s “melded into one field of feeling and experience” [6] with “a call for a willingness to be affected … without blurring the lines between the self and the other.”[7] This presupposes that the visceral feeling would be the same for individual archivists or should be learned, and an outward archival behavior needs to be manifested that shows “empathic care.” Can we position the individual’s need in the collective and the collective’s need in the individual while honoring the one size doesn’t fit all paradigm? Koss-Chiono touches upon a very important aspect of the caregiver: "‘empathic attunement,’ or the attempt to experience as closely as possible what the patient is experiencing (Rowe & MacIsaac, 1989). Throughout these discussions, however, there is a thread of discomfort about the therapist’s need to move in and out of an empathic state, in order to preserve a sense of neutrality”[8] Is the goal to be neutral?  Can we be neutral?

Let me give you an example: I was a pediatric registered nurse working on the terminally ill cancer ward, administering chemotherapy to children from toddlers to teenagers. The Bachelor of Nursing curriculum had a core mandatory ethics course and for pediatric chemotherapy nurses there was an annual mandatory training on the difference between sympathy and empathy, and how to be sympathetic to the patient and empathetic to the self to avoid burnout (see post-scriptum).  All the courses and training in the world wouldn’t have worked for me – a naturally born empath, who could not “move in and out of the empathic state.”  I tried many techniques and learned cerebral strategies to no avail. I got sick every day with my patients and on my off days I grieved the loss of the children who passed during my shift. It was the most challenging, exhilarating, and the worst experience all tangled together. We, the nurses, celebrated the small triumphs of ‘in remission’ test results with the parents, and then I witnessed the agony of countless mothers losing their children to this wicked ‘false hope’ disease.

I didn’t last. I couldn’t. The empathy felt too radical. It was intense. I left after two years.

A peer-reviewed, scientific article from NIH examines the relationship between burnout and empathy.[9] It distinguishes empathy from related concepts such as 'compassion fatigue' and sympathy; outlines four key dimensions of empathy: emotive, cognitive, behavioral, and moral; and their interplay with the three dimensions of burnout; emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and personal accomplishment (PA). As libraries are becoming more like community centers with more social services/caregiver dimensions/roles added to the responsibilities of librarians such as tending to refugees or administering Narcan to counteract overdose cases of unhoused patrons and save lives; would then radical empathy in libraries/archives - in the absence of continuous, chronic, or immediate life and death situations - potentially create burnout and be counterproductive?

Fast forward to the pandemic, when I interviewed for a part-time position with the Shoah Foundation to transcribe and index Armenian Genocide survivors’ oral testimonies. I felt an ethical responsibility to employ my metadata skills in service of engaging with sensitive material with which I was intimately connected and sharing my perspective. At the end of the interview, they asked an odd question: “Are you sure you can emotionally handle transcribing ten hours of this material?” In retrospect, that was radical empathy in praxis. They gave me a week to try and assess myself. They had a point; I didn’t move forward with it. Later, I heard that they require weekly therapy sessions for the transcribers. How revolutionary!

I had completely discounted the transgenerational trauma of being a descendant of survivors of a genocide that is still denied and the impact of its affective dimensions on my psyche. So, how do I balance working with potentially traumatic material in my professional work while applying radical empathy to the “record creators, subjects, users, communities,” fellow archivists, and myself? Can we quantify this additional responsibility in an already understaffed and underpaid profession? Are we inadvertently reinforcing pay inequities?

I want to believe that this type of ethics of care would build a culture of change from the bottom-up, as more individual professionals put into practice radical empathy, but I am skeptical. Recently, my faith in the innate goodness of humans is shaken. Must it always be a struggle? Must structural change always fall on individual efforts at the bottom?  

Institutions are not abstract ideas or physical structures; they are made of humans. Humans who I hope would apply radical empathy (even if learned) in their decision-making.  Where is the structural ethics of care and radical empathy in our higher education, specifically in the UC system? From administrators to departments to professors? Where is the radical empathy toward student workers, who sacrificed their livelihoods for a social justice cause? And yes, there was an incremental quasi-victory incommensurate with the efforts, knowing full well that the UC is financially able to meet the demands, increase the annual income to humane levels, and alleviate the basic needs burden of students so that they would be able to focus on education and research.

Returning to the call of Arroyo-Ramirez: “…more research focused on the affective impact of our work is necessary to help guide course offerings, services, and training on the subject. Much like a curator is expected to have a subject background in the area she collects, archivists (and curators) should be required to have training or coursework that focuses on the process of emotional attachment, grieving, and its traumatic effect on people.”[10] A recent qualitative research in Canada explores “the impact of personal connections and the nature of empathic engagement

between archivists, donors, community researchers, and the records themselves on emotional response,”[11] and provide new set of responsibilities to institutions of higher learning, who are educating future archivists. In addition, the Australian Society of Archivists has developed an online training course on the ‘trauma-informed approach to managing archives’ that addresses the impact of vicarious trauma not only for the individual professional but also as an organizational issue.[12] As a starting point, I propose a curriculum enrichment approach for Master of Science in Library and Information studies. To include a basic course in ethics, in the vein of Sarah Clark Miller’s “Ethics of Need” framework in relation to being ‘moral agents’ with a ‘duty to care’;[13] applying those concepts to the caregiver first, in this case, the IS professionals/to-be. In the words of Temi Odumosu, “Since ethics and caretaking are the product of collective negotiation, this thought exercise should too be open for questioning and debate.”[14]

To invoke Audre Lorde’s concept:[15] will LIS use its own tools to dismantle its own house and rebuild it with ethics of care rooted in radical empathy? We shall wait and see.

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P.S. It seems that the understanding of sympathy and empathy has switched places from the classic dictionary entries. A quick internet search promotes empathy as the favorite sister to the wicked sympathy.

Oxford English Dictionary

·       Sympathy (n.) The quality or state of being affected by the condition of another with a feeling similar or corresponding to that of the other; the fact or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings of another or others; fellow-feeling. Also, a feeling or frame of mind evoked by and responsive to some external influence. Const. with (a person, etc., or a feeling).

·       Empathy (n.) Originally Psychology. The ability to understand and appreciate another person's feelings, experience, etc.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sympathy-empathy-difference

·       Sympathy (which comes from the Greek sym, meaning "together," and pathos, referring to feelings or emotion) is used when one person shares the feelings of another; an example is when one experiences sadness when someone close is experiencing grief or loss.

·      Empathy is also related to pathos. It differs from sympathy in carrying an implication of greater emotional distance. With empathy, you can imagine or understand how someone might feel, without necessarily having those feelings yourself.

 

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[1] Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, “Radical Empathy in the Context of Suspended Grief: An Affective Web of Mutual Loss,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021): 1-15. https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/134

[2] See Michelle Caswell, and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81, (Spring 2016): 23-43. See also, Michelle Caswell, and Marika Cifor, “Revisiting a Feminist Ethics of Care: An Introductory Note,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021). https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/162.

Anne Gilliland, “Moving Past: Probing the Agency and Affect of Recordkeeping in Individual and Community Lives in Post-Conflict Croatia,” Archival Science 14, no. 3–4 (2014): 249–74. James Lowry, “Radical Empathy, the Imaginary and Affect in (Post)Colonial Records: How to Breakout of International Stalemates on Displaced Archives,” Archival Science 19, no. 2 (2019): 185–203. Marika Marika Cifor, “Affecting Relations: Introducing Affect Theory to Archival Discourse,” Archival Science 16, no. 1 (2015): 7–31. Anne Gilliland, and Michelle Caswell, “Records and Their Imaginaries: Imagining the Impossible, Making Possible the Imagined,” Archival Science 16, no. 1 (2015): 53–75.

[3] Arroyo-Ramírez, “Suspended Grief,” 12.

[4] Caswell and Cifor, “Radical Empathy,” 33-41. See questions within each affective responsibility.

[6] Joan D. Koss-Chioino, “Spiritual Transformation, Relation and Radical Empathy: Core Components of the Ritual Healing Process,” Transcultural Psychiatry 43, no. 4 (2006): 656.

[7] Caswell and Cifor, “Radical Empathy,” 31.

[8] Koss-Chioino, “Spiritual Transformation,” 660.

[9] Helen Wilkinson, Richard Whittington, Lorraine Perry, and Catrin Eames, “Examining the relationship between burnout and empathy in healthcare professionals: A systematic review,” Burnout research 6, (2017): 18-29. doi:10.1016/j.burn.2017.06.003

[10] Arroyo-Ramírez, “Suspended Grief,” 13.

[11]  Cheryl Regehr, Wendy Duff, Henria Aton, and Christa Sato, “‘Humans and Records Are Entangled’: Empathic Engagement and Emotional Response in Archivists,” Archival Science 22, (2022): 563–83. 

[12] Nicola Laurent, and Kirsten Wright, “A Trauma-Informed Approach to Managing Archives: A New Online Course,” Archives & Manuscripts 48, no.1 (2020): 80–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2019.1705170.

[13] Sarah Clark Miller, “Introduction,” in The Ethics of Need : Agency, Dignity, and Obligation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1-14.

[14] Temi Odumosu, “The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons,” Current Anthropology 61, supplement 22 (2020): S290.

[15] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110-113.