This special session brings together four early-career scholars — from doctoral candidates to visiting professors — to reflect critically on ethical and methodological guidelines for archival work amidst the acceleration of surveillance and persecution (including state-sponsored and digitally enabled forms) against vulnerable populations. The thematic element that brings all selected presentations together is the archive itself, as both a site of potential risk and as a space of individual agency. The enthusiastic responses to the panel topic demonstrate that this conversation is as urgent as it is relevant.

The session includes presenters from four countries across the Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and Ecuador. To provide historical context, Euge Stumm will open the session revisiting the colonial archive through a digital humanist approach to analyze early attempts of gender-inclusive Spanish in Latin America in a time when elliptical writing served as a survival strategy for gender and sexual dissidents. Moving to the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, Dr. María José Gutierrez analyzes video letters from the 1970s to the early 2000s, drawing on materials held in the Archive of Audiovisual Ecuadorian Migrant Memory to explore how migrants in the U.S. navigate the emotional experience of migration, examining the stakes of archiving then and now. Covering the 2020s, Lucas Ruppel presents the community-based digital archive Autobiography with Care, analyzing the challenges of caregivers in documenting narratives about gender and sexually diverse migrants at the Mexico–U.S. border. Finally, Sophie Been examines the stakes of including autobiographical details in academic writing for queer and gender-diverse early-career academics in North America, focusing on early-career publications and doctoral dissertations that address gender and sexuality studies.

Each speaker will have up to 15 minutes to present, reserving the remaining 15 minutes of the special session for questions and discussion. By comparing the stakes of archiving across time, this session urges participants to consider ethical frameworks for data stewardship and community consent amidst the ongoing surveillance and censorship crisis — including the right not to be archived. More than ever, we call for dialogue between researchers, archivists, and the communities — queer, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, trans, migrant, and otherwise marginalized — whose materials, and whose safety, are at stake.