This workshop brought together archivists, legal practitioners, activists and scholars to explore the interactions between archival practice, ethics and the law in India. It was an opportunity to discuss both what the role of the law is for archival practice, as well as what it should be, and how legal and ethical questions can potentially be navigated by archivists. The discussions in the workshop will inform an open access guidebook on archives, ethics and the law intended to help archivists in different contexts navigate these issues.

On day 2, Siddarth S Ganesh from QAMRA was part of a panel discussion:

Panelists: Vrundha Pathare, Godrej Culture Labs; Ranjani and Faisal, Keystone Foundation; Siddarth S Ganesh, QAMRA.

Theme: Ethics in archival practise. The questions asked concerned the responsibility of the archivist to the archive, the public, and the stakeholders in the archive.

A resume of what Siddarth spoke about:

Sometimes, there is a very fine line separating archive from archivist. As archivists, we shape our archives. Our politics, methodologies and ideologies come to define it, come to construct it. In an archive of queer communities, my responsibility is in recognising the hegemonies between these communities and questioning the hierarchies and power dynamics we construct and/or deconstruct in the archive. The power of the archive, the power of the archived, and the power of the user—our responsibility lies in interrogating how these three interplay in the various contexts of consent, privacy, granting access, preservation, and in a larger framework, how they contribute to history and historiography. The archivist’s responsibility to the archive is not just theoretical, but in praxis enters the ways in which we acquire material, how we catalogue and in metadata population, and in granting/restricting access to certain materials. Archivists are not the gatekeepers to the knowledge created and curated in and through the archive. This is reinforced in the idea that trust has to be established between the archived, the archive and the archivist by granting the archived the right to control how much of their information is housed in the archive, and who gets access to it.