The Silverfish

My fellow archivist, Deepika, and I don’t see it as a coincidence that our first standalone collection from a woman scientist entered the archive after the team had expanded significantly to include more women archivists, some of us with a background in and keen understanding of the culture of science, feminist theory, women’s movements and activism. With this we were able to leverage the archives’ access to networks of researchers working on women in science.

Even though we had developed a weighted points matrix to help us prioritise which sources to accession material from, the first standalone collection – the Krishnaja AP Papers – came in nearly 6 months later. It arrived at the Archives through a collaboration with Nandita Jayaraj, a journalist, science communicator and author who had been one of the founders of The Life of Science, an online platform that describes itself as “a multiform diary of experiences of women and minorities in science, collected on lab-hopping journeys across India.” Nandita did a series of oral history interviews with six scientists who were women (and prior contacts of hers), nearly all of whom have subsequently donated or expressed an interest in donating their papers to the Archives at NCBS. 

Deepika was also present in preliminary meetings with all of the interviewees and stayed in contact with them long after the collaboration with Nandita ended. This project convinced us of the need to have diverse staff and collaborators with varied personal networks, the need to build and maintain relationships with potential donors, and of the efficacy as a strategy of using oral history interviews to build these relationships (which in several cases led to the acquiring of physical collections). 

Archivists actively shape the kinds of physical material we receive through our interactions with donors and the decisions we make about what to collect.

When packing material of possible archival value at the home of Dr Krishnaja AP, a retired cytogeneticist in her 70s, we decided to include a folder of unusual material along with papers about Krishnaja’s life and career: clippings of food recipes from a range of women’s magazines. At first glance, it seemed to say little about Krishnaja’s work as a scientist; but in conversation with Krishnaja at her home in Mumbai, we understood that they seemed to matter to Krishnaja and had been preserved in the same way and in the same location as all of Krishnaja’s other material about her career in science. Subsequently, once Krishnaja’s material was transported to the archives and an appraisal of the material was carried out, we decided to retain the recipes with the collection.

Some of us were initially concerned that retaining them might reinforce stereotypes about women scientists, considering this was the Archives’ first standalone collection from a woman, and considering the accomplishments of women scientists are sometimes eclipsed by their domestic roles – like in the New York Times obituary for American rocket scientist, Yvonne Brill that originally opened by listing her domestic achievements, including making a “mean beef stroganoff”. But Krishnaja’s recipes now form a small part of her collection, listed as a single folder in Sub-series 1 of Series 3: Personal & Hobbies; the first two series in the collection being Correspondence and Research.

The recipes have no equivalent in any of the collections at the Archives that include papers from male scientists, and reveal the gendered nature of domestic duties and how when archiving the lives of women scientists, there may not be a neat line between the personal and professional.

Archival structures do not remain isolated from subjectivity, they are constructed and shaped by the biases, intent and emotions of the people who pass through it, though archives tend to obfuscate or choose to not record these subjective interventions that frame the types of material it collects, the kinds of access it enables and the forms of knowledge it preserves.

If subjectivity is ingrained into archival structures, why do mainstream archives shy away from recording it? There is much mainstream archives can learn from feminist and queer collectives who, as researcher and art archives expert, Mela Dávila-Freire points out, “have been remarkably active in their endeavours for archival emancipation, not only building their own archives and pointing out historical absences or gaps in hegemonic documentary collections, but also identifying information categories that mainstream archives have not explicitly recorded – such as affects, feeling or emotions.”

This article is an extract from a presentation by archivists, Anjali J R and Deepika S, at a conference of the International Council of Archives in San Francisco.