Decentralizing the Archive: What Movement Organizing Can Teach Us About Who Gets Remembered

Researchers across the globe, including some here at the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI), are engaged in discussions about decentralized organizing. Decentralized organizing is a model in which autonomous local groups, sparked by shared causes, act independently but in unison, building a united front that can scale toward material wins. This approach echoes Ella Baker’s group-centered leadership, an organizing model that distributes movement leadership rather than relying on a central charismatic leader. 

Just as movements are distributing power, decision-making, and knowledge across many hands, communities can build, hold, and interpret the archives that document their own lives. When we hear the word archive, we probably imagine boxes of old documents in a university library. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) defines archives as the materials a person, family, or organization generates in the course of their affairs and that are kept because of their lasting value or as evidence of what the creator did and was responsible for. But that definition opens up a bigger question: Who gets to create the records that become our history? Critical archival studies puts that question at the center, asking how archives are shaped by power and how they might serve social justice.

Tech developers are also thinking along these lines, creating online platforms that spread historical content across peer-to-peer networks to make it resistant to takedown and tampering. The decentralized archive I’m describing is not only about storage architecture. It is an organizing tool, a way of democratizing knowledge production, and empowering communities to document their own truths.

A decentralized archive could be built through everyday practices at the local level with organizers, practitioners, families, and neighbors documenting their own practices of resistance, rather than leaving institutions to decide after the fact what was worth keeping. 

The upcoming election presents a crucial moment to document federal actions that Democracy Forward says could suppress voter participation, effective practices against  suppression, and interpretations of electoral outcomes. Doing so could produce a more democratized account of our history that reflects our collective truth rather than an abridged version penned by a few powerful elite. This work is increasingly urgent at a time when history is being rapidly revised and erased by the federal government. A decentralized archive could also produce records for accountability and litigation, not only for memory.

A Decentralized Archive for the Movement to Meet the Moment

Institutional record-keeping almost inevitably reflects the perspective of the institution doing the recording. A social service agency documents the services it provides. A government agency documents the policies it implements. These records can be valuable, but they are not neutral accounts of what happened. They are records of what institutions saw, deemed important, and had the power to preserve.

Archives offer a space of duality where power and identity can be maintained or contested.

Memory is political for precisely this reason. In The Struggle for the People’s King, sociologist and ERI faculty affiliate Hajar Yazdiha examines how movements across the political spectrum invoke competing versions of the Civil Rights Movement to make claims about national identity and inclusion. She describes collective memory as a socially constructed story about the past that helps groups understand “who we are” and can be used to argue for “who we ought to be.”

The struggle over memory, then, is also a struggle over political possibility. This is why the privilege of being remembered matters, and why it belongs in a conversation about movement building. 

Movements depend on histories of strategies, challenges, and relationships that earlier organizers iterated on. When that knowledge is held by inaccessible institutions, or lost due to state suppression, each generation of organizers may have to relearn it from scratch. A movement that has decentralized its organizing but not its memory-keeping has left a piece of its infrastructure vulnerable to erasure.

Decentralization also has well-known trade-offs. Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” warned that the absence of formal structure can hide and thereby shield power. The same caution applies to archives. A decentralized archive without shared practices for description, consent, and preservation risks becoming a scattering of lost files and uneven recording by whoever had the time and tools to document. Decentralizing the archive should mean distributing authority, not abandoning standards. So, how can we see ourselves not only as consumers of archives, but as potential archivists?

A New Kind of Archive is Emerging 

Oral histories build archives that fill in what institutional archives leave out. They can preserve knowledge that lives primarily within communities, and provide accounts that complicate or challenge official narratives. Importantly, oral history is a practice of shared authority, in which both the interviewer and narrator shape what is meaningful, what is shared, and how the account is preserved and accessed.

You do not need to work at a university or historical society to create an archive. A community project like Queering the Map can preserve meeting notes, photographs, campaign materials, and oral histories. A practitioner can document what happened when a new policy was implemented, detailing not just its purpose, but how it actually affected the people it was meant to serve. A family can record the stories of an elder whose experiences may never appear in an official record. These ordinary materials might become extraordinary later.

Examples of community-centered archival work are increasingly visible. Arizona State University’s Community-Driven Archives Initiative supports community archivists in building their own archives outside the university and shares stewardship with community members. A 2019 settlement released nearly 200 boxes of Los Angeles Police Department historical records, forming the foundation of a community archive tool by the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative at UCLA to support policy change, civil liability cases, and organizing.

The connection to litigation is noteworthy because it points to how archives can be put into action. In North Carolina, groups fighting against data centers raised concerns about threats to historic Black cemeteries and Indigenous heritage sites. In another state, I’m also part of an oral history team planning to use community accounts in legal challenges to data-center development and the desecration of Black and Indigenous cemeteries.

Louisiana offers another model, where environmental groups used descendants’ accounts  alongside archaeological analysis and genealogical records to investigate burial sites and brought a lawsuit against Formosa Plastics citing the Thirteenth Amendment and state cemetery law. A related challenge to land-use policies in St. James Parish cited the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). These examples demonstrate how oral histories can support organizing, strengthen legal challenges, and help protect community heritage.

With many ballot measures across the country this November about data centers and the use of public resources, oral histories offer a timely and useful resource for organizing and legal challenges. What we choose to record today helps determine what people tomorrow will know about us and, perhaps more importantly, what they will be able to imagine doing differently. 

About the author:

Bethany Murray PhD, is a Turpanjian Postdoctoral Fellow at USC’s Equity Research Institute. Her scholarship examines the historical and contemporary interlockings of social work, policing, and the criminal legal system. Her research sits at the intersection of social welfare history, sociolegal studies, and critical carceral studies, with a particular focus on carceral governance and the intertwined governing logics of care and carcerality.