I examined the social content of the United Nations (UN) policies that aim at the protection of "traditional knowledge" (TK) of populations classified by international law as indigenous peoples. The UN category "traditional knowledge" embraces a wide range of products of the indigenous cultural and intellectual activities. I conjectured that while the TK policies were ostensibly aimed at protecting indigenous peoples from the misappropriation of these products, the major factor leading to creation of TK protection measures were the interests pursued by the third parties to benefit from indigenous intellectual resources. I examined the policies produced since 1992 by the UN agencies working on the issues of (1) economic development and conservation (CBD, UNEP, FAO, World Bank, UNCED, UNDP), and (2) protection of intangible heritage (WIPO, UNESCO, WGIP) to test my conjecture. I complemented this examination by a study of 100 conservation projects conducted on the territories of indigenous peoples (2002-2012). Informed by the archival theory perspective I learned that the TK protection measures focused significantly on a necessity to develop indigenous expertise as tools of sustainability/conservation. Despite the use of indigenous practices in conservation projects only certain indigenous groups benefitted from these projects, where most groups experienced negative consequences. The TK policy approach remained foreign to indigenous positioning on the TK protection issues: indigenous collective rights claims received little political recognition; currently proposed mechanisms of protection -"the prior informed consent" and "fair benefit sharing"- responded to the indigenous needs only partly.

Next I examined indigenous participation at the UN drawing on the sociology of knowledge perspective, and used the history of indigenous engagement with WIPO IGC (2001-2012) as a case study. Although the degree of indigenous political influence at IGC was low, the positive changes indigenous work produced in the positioning of the indigenous caucus at IGC could be considered unprecedented in the history of the UN agencies. I concluded that despite that the work on the TK protection can be considered to some extent as the step toward easing the access to indigenous forms of knowledge by interested parties, such as scholars and researchers working in the area of development and conservation (vs. address needs and interests of indigenous peoples), it had the unintended consequence of the growth of indigenous engagement in making these policies.

Substantively the study advances scholarly understanding (1) of the social context of the UN policy making and the significance of records as tools of institutional and political practices; and (2) of the forms of indigenous advocacy. Methodologically it complements research across sociological and archival studies of records and political settings. As a praxis-oriented endeavor it may contribute to more effective indigenous advocacy.

The dissertation, Asian Greek Sisterhoods: Archives, Affects, and Belongings in Asian American Sororities, 1929-2015, examines the kinds of archives produced by Asian American women in single-gender social organizations or Asian Greek-letter sororities, reconceiving them as transformative acts of affects: embodied memory-keeping practices that transmit knowledge, traditions, cultural practices, and social customs as collective identities and communal histories across time and space, among different, diverse groups of ethnic-Asian women from one generation to the next. The archives reconceived as the transformative acts of affects and participatory memory-keeping practices in Asian American women sororities demonstrate collective and individual identities in complex, crafted social communities.

The affective archives of the Asian American sisterhoods of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi complicate the conventional understandings of the archives and memory-keeping projects in minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised communities of color in the United States. These sororities’ archives of affects and affections not only revise remembering as recuperative practices motivated by the anxieties of personal and collective community forgetting and loss, but also serve as the embodied performances of communal memories that celebrate identities, social cultures, and shared histories and experiences.

The dissertation is a multi-method study that includes thirty-three in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013, as well as ethnographic observations of and archival research on Active members and alumnae of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi, the two historically Asian American sororities established at the University of California, Los Angeles: Chi Alpha Delta, founded in 1929 and Theta Kappa Phi, founded in 1959.

Prior to 2010, there was virtually no population-based health data on trans and gender variant populations at the federal, state, or local level in California. The population was invisible in the data. This research project took the formation of such an odd silence in the data as the motivation to form a qualitative approach to studying how gender has been encoded in medical records and health data in California. The project focused on identifying which aspects of gender were able to be recorded and what aspects were not able to be represented within the affordances observed in the recordkeeping structures. The research materials documented practices in public health and medical recordkeeping contexts at a critical historical juncture, when practices were in flux, both locally and nationally, focusing on three research sites in California, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. All of the sites were directly engaged with recordkeeping questions around how gender is encoded for trans and gender variant populations, working collaboratively to develop the information structures for representing gender and gender variance in their recordkeeping systems.

The analysis produced documentation of the information structures encoding gender at each of the sites and concluded that there are six (6) major functional information recordkeeping elements conflated under the current system of binary gender markers, including elements of gender identity, social gender (pronouns), medical gender, legal gender, organ lists and sex assigned at birth. Several of these elements operate in unrelated fields of policy discourse, such as those around identity documents (legal gender) versus medical diagnoses (medical gender). These overlapping policy environments often conflict in reality, yielding uncountable populations of trans and gender variant persons attempting to access care with unresolvable incongruence between the legal, medical and social records of gender. The information disparities in the functionality to record gender variance suggests that system designers need to be more concerned with the edge effects affecting populations who are poorly represented within data structures, especially as these recordkeeping systems are scaled up to include the entire general population writ large. Many patients still withhold gender identity information from healthcare systems, which suggests that conflicts in recordkeeping practices cannot be resolved without first addressing basic safety and data security issues for trans and gender variant populations.

This dissertation is a history of the development of the Short Message Service (SMS) format, also known as the text message. The SMS teleservice that was developed by the Global System for Mobile Communication in the mid-1980s for second-generation mobile networks is made up of standards, protocols and infrastructure that make text messaging the most popular data service on mobile networks. The teleservice has since been used in all subsequent generations of digital cellular mobile telephony. The dissertation shows how SMS standards and infrastructure represent a significant innovation to mobile telephony and how they have figured in the history of wireless data transmission in the late twentieth century.

The standardization of SMS and telecommunication protocols that make the transmission of text messages possible influences the future uses of these digital traces, including their evidential capacity, future access, and curation. As a new mobile communication format, text messages have cultural, political, and economic consequences that span the world. Billions of text messages are sent and received every day: they are used in personal communication, crisis management, elections, mobile banking, business communications, and increasingly through applications that serve as gateways to the Internet. Despite the ubiquity of this mobile communication format, text messages are deleted, lost or overwritten at staggering rates by users and mobile operating systems. Mobile traces such as text messages currently fall outside of institutional digital archives as well as personal digital collections. This dissertation demonstrates how the infrastructure of mobile communication, including transmission protocol and the stabilization of the format, is integral to the curation, future access, and preservation of mobile communication at the personal and institutional levels of collecting.

The dissertation examines the development of SMS by contextualizing the research need for the study of mobile information objects in information science by presenting the importance of layers of infrastructure to the creation and circulation of born-digital records transmitted across wireless networks. It applies a research framework for studying new information communication technologies and emerging electronic records contexts. The framework has three elements: (1) Layers of Infrastructure and Context, (2) Examining Networked Recordkeeping, and (3) Engaging with Information Retrieval. Using techniques from infrastructure studies and media archaeology, it illustrates how the text message as a digital format has been enacted by the mobile operating system on mobile phones. In turn, it shows how the text message format structures mobile communication over time in different contexts of creation and collection. It also highlights how the format is enacted in a mobile operating system: how text messages are stored on device hardware such as flash memory, and in various end-uses such as deletion and in surveillance. The digital materiality of text messages in transmission, storage, and receipt is shown to have social and political consequences for the future of fonds or collections of personal digital records that people create with their mobile phones.

The dissertation also illustrates how the generation, circulation, and collection of mobile telephony metadata represents a new form of collecting for institutions, under the law, and for the theory and practice of archival science. It argues that new contexts of metadata creation and collection have led to a mobile forensic imaginary based on the infrastructure and transmission of born-networked records created with mobile ICTs. The dissertation finds that a more productive way of confronting emerging mobile information objects and their digital preservation over time is to critically engage with their development as formatted digital objects and presents a theory of text messages as born networked records.

Archival Science has been defined as the systematic body of theory that supports the practice of appraising, acquiring, authenticating, preserving, and providing access to recorded materials. In the first of a two-part analysis of the past, present and future of archival education and pedagogy, this article deconstructs the concept of Archival Science by examining the development and evolution of its key ideas and principles, and the historical interplay between them and such constructs as modernism, objectivity, scientific management, nationalism, sovereignty, and colonialism. It argues that education in Archival Science, which traditionally has included elements of both professional practice and scholarship and which has only scantily reflected upon the pedagogies it has employed, has played a fundamental role in perpetuating the cultural hegemony of dominant groups. It has done so by inculcating archival ideas and principles without simultaneously providing sufficient historical analysis of their derivations or original intent, and without nurturing a critical perspective that would encourage sensitivity on the part of future archival professionals and scholars to the cultural and social implications of what are often regarded as “value-neutral” concepts and practices, particularly in terms of their impact on the record-keeping and memory practices of marginalized and under-represented groups.