Research
Abolitionist Archival Imaginaries
My dissertation project examines how communities impacted by incarceration use practices such as storytelling, oral history, and community archiving to resist state violence. U.S. carceral systems have long used archival records to construct narratives that criminalize people, particularly Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. At the same time, however, survivors of state violence, organizers, and advocates are increasingly using memory work as a tactic for denaturalizing the prison’s place in our society. Such community-based oral history and archiving efforts convey the impact of incarceration, with implications for how we understand the past, present, and future of the carceral state. My dissertation studies this memory work, asking: How does archiving experiences of incarceration help communities imagine and move toward futures free from the violence of imprisonment? I answer this question through ethnographic research at three archives that collect materials from those who have experienced incarceration: After Violence Project, Rikers Public Memory Project, and the Voices of Mass Incarceration initiative at Brown University’s John Hay Library. In my analysis of interviews, fieldnotes, and archival collections from these sites, I draw on abolition feminism as a theoretical framework. Arguing for systemic and non-carceral approaches to addressing harm, abolition feminism introduces alternative understandings of justice to archival theory, which has been largely undergirded by legalistic conceptions of evidence and accountability. By describing an archival praxis rooted in transformative justice, community accountability, and systemic change, my dissertation not only contributes to information studies, but to the various interdisciplinary fields that study the carceral state, social movements, and collective memory.
Click here to download a zine I created about my dissertation research.
Ethics of Carceral Collecting
A qualitative research project on the archiving of incarceration-related materials at universities. In recent years, academic archives have increasingly devoted resources to documenting the impact of mass incarceration in the U.S. My research focuses on this emerging collecting area by conducting interviews with archivists at repositories that have undertaken this work. The findings of this research focus on the particular ethical difficulties of archiving materials related to incarceration, which are often made more complex by the carceral entanglements of the universities in which this work occurs. I argue for a liberatory approach to archiving incarceration materials, with a focus on how this work can help get people free.
Publications on this research
"Caring for Archives of Incarceration: The Ethics of Carceral Collecting at University Archives," Archivaria 97 (May 2024), 26-80. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13957
Virtual Belonging: Assessing the Affective Impact of Digital Records Creation with Community Archives
With the UCLA Community Archives Lab, After Violence Project, and the South Asian American Digital Archive
A four-year participatory action research project led by After Violence Project (AVP) and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in collaboration with the UCLA Community Archives Lab. Through funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the project sponsored archival fellows at AVP and SAADA as they used digital technologies to collect oral histories and other records from their community. As part of a research team at UCLA, I worked with the fellows and the interviewees to develop tools that center the experiences and needs of contributors to community-based archives like AVP and SAADA. Along with the project PI from UCLA, Dr. Michelle Caswell, I co-authored four peer reviewed publications on the affective impact of using digital technologies like Zoom to create and collect archival records.
Publications on this research (co-authored)
Michelle Caswell, Anna Robinson-Sweet & Sadaf Ahmadbeigi, “Sometimes A Kitchen, Sometimes a Zoom Call”: Experiences of Recording Oral Histories Online,” The Public Historian, forthcoming (Winter 2026)
Anna Robinson-Sweet & Michelle Caswell, “Paying it Forward: The Prefigurative Politics of Record Creation.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies: 2025, Vol. 8, No. 1, https://kula.uvic.ca/index.php/kula/article/view/292/513.
Michelle Caswell and Anna Robinson-Sweet, "'We Bounce off Each Other's Vibe': The Importance of Symmetrical Intersubjectivity Between Interviewer and Narrator," The Oral History Review 51 (2024), 179-202. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00940798.2024.2316904
Michelle Caswell and Anna Robinson-Sweet, "'It Was as Much for Me as For Anybody Else': The Creation of Self-Validating Records," The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 10 (2023). https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol10/iss1/10/