In this virtual roundtable conversation, participants from the Beyond Best Practices (BBP) working group will discuss their collective study in radical memory work, community-centered oral history, and imaginative archival work from this past year. A shifting group of BIPOC memory workers—including oral historians, interdisciplinary scholars, educators, archivists, writers, editors, and DJs—who first came together in 2021/2022, BBP participants will discuss the systemic challenges they face as they pursue their emergent memory work within institutional contexts. Situated in and/or working in solidarity with peoples and communities impacted by state violence and precarity—including communities affected by incarceration, queer and trans communities in rural areas, undocumented migrants, immigrants and refugees, and Indigenous peoples—participants will share what it means to create situated methods and practices that depart from professionalized oral history, archival, and educational training. Questions that panelists will collectively engage include:

What does community-centered memory work mean to you? What does it feel, look, sound like? 
Who are peoples and communities you are in relationship with? How has your situated and local work shaped, changed, and/or challenged the ways you were trained and taught to do memory work?
What critical practices, principles, and ethical orientations are the most important to you? What other ways of knowing have emerged from your work?

BBP Participants include:

Trey Adcock (he/him),ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, Cherokee Nation, Executive Director, The Center for Native Health, Associate Professor, UNC Asheville

Crystal Mun-hye Baik (she/her), BBP Convener, UCR Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies

Ela Banerjee (she/her), Community Partnership Manager at Voice of Witness

Fanny García (she/her), Independent Oral Historian and Project Director for Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity

Rochelle Kwan (she/her), Chinatown Records 華埠錄音, Think!Chinatown, Self Evident

mads lê (no pronouns/name), UCLA information studies doctoral candidate, Viet Rainbow Orange County (VROC) Board Chair

Dao X. Tran (she/her), Editorial Director at Voice of Witness, editorial board member (Haymarket Books)

Nikki Yeboah, (she/her) Assistant Professor of Playwriting, University of Washington