Collecting evidence of counter-narrative: the unspoken labor of archiving justice & recovering the material wages owed

Abstract Contemporary information workers in the United States, especially community-based archivists, have been collectors, stewards, and preservationists of counternarratives against justice-serving institutions that systematically disbelieve, and distrust historically marginalized groups. While many information professionals refer to these counternarrative projects as passion projects, and, or activism, I argue that by doing so, information professionals do a disservice to both themselves, and the populations they aim to serve. Instead, I apply theoretical frameworks of immaterial labor and emotional labor, to re-analyze scholarly literature of community-based archives, and other professional counternarrative work in order to reveal the labor involved in these justice-oriented projects. I do this re-interpretation of our work to construct an argument that by asserting ourselves as counternarrative professionals, we become experts, and therefore witnesses to injustice. This ability to support our patrons is particularly important given the gendered, and racialized trends of disbelief not only in the United States criminal justice systems, but also embedded in the nature of counternarrative, and countertestimony against colonial regimes, writ large.