Abstract
This article aims to envision how archives could better reflect and represent neurodivergent records creators—people whose brains function in ways that diverge significantly from dominant societal standards of “normal". It discusses how neurodivergent records creators and their recordkeeping behaviors often do not fit within traditional archival paradigms which center verbal, written, and linear documents in specific organizational systems. The article then brings together sources from disability studies, feminist and gender studies, library studies, literary analysis, and archival scholarship to imagine ways in which the principle of provenance could be expanded to fit the archives of neurodiverse creators (and archives that resist wholeness and completeness more broadly). One way of conceptualizing this is through the idea of variegation, or of a unified whole comprised of multiple distinct elements. In an application of provenance that is not uniform but instead variegated, we could begin to extend a framework of neurodiversity to archival arrangement and description.
Recommended Citation
Penniman, Sophie
(2023)
"Variegated Order: Making Space for Neurodiverse Perspectives in Archives,"
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 10, Article 22.
Available at:
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol10/iss1/22