Archiving Afghan-Canadian Long-Time Settlement Experiences: Emergent Methods & Digital Design

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Archiving Afghan-Canadian Long-time Settlement Experiences: Emergent Methods & Digital Design

Moska Rokay

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Faculty of Information University of Toronto

Archiving Afghan-Canadian Long-time Settlement Experiences: Emergent Methods & Digital Design

Moska Rokay

Master of Information

Faculty of Information University of Toronto

2019 ABSTRACT

Skewed, damage-centered narratives based on war and violence have shaped Canadian views of the Afghan-Canadian diaspora despite almost four decades in Canada. This study uses critical ethnography and iterative digital design methodologies to conduct oral histories of a slice of the long-time settled Afghan-Canadian diaspora in order to understand their digital archival needs and identity-formation processes. The result is a proof-of-concept digital archive called the

Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives (ACDA). The findings demonstrate that the Afghan diaspora in Canada, more specifically the intersection of the diaspora represented in this thesis, agree that digital archives could provide answers to problems that they identified in their community: working against symbolic annihilation of minority identities within the community, the lack of a pedagogical resource on the community’s history and stories, and the desire for a platform to present their successful integration to all Canadians.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Words are wildly insufficient and embarrassingly incompetent to accurately convey the gratitude, appreciation, and thanks I feel for those that have supported me throughout this thesis journey.

First and foremost, I would like to place the spotlight on my brilliant, kind, and patient thesis supervisor, Professor TL Cowan. Without her guidance, knowledge, labour, and expertise this thesis would not have existed in its current form nor would I have had the inspiration and motivation to pursue one in the first place. Her support is priceless -- beyond feeble human comprehension. Thank you.

I would like to express my gratitude to my second reader, Professor Sarah Sharma, whose counsel and encouragement opened my eyes to my own potential. Her perspective and thoughtful critique was invaluable.

I am also thankful for the irreplaceable prowess of my external examiner, Dr Sara Shroff, whose meaningful suggestions and advice was influential for the future of my research.

Undoubtedly, I would also like to thank the staff and faculty of the Faculty of Information for their help and support, especially during the beginning stages of this research. I would particularly like to thank the Associate Dean, Research, Professor Leslie Shade, and the Faculty’s Research Funding Coordinator, Stephanie Fisher, for their priceless guidance and assistance with my Research Ethics Board application. On that note, I certainly cannot forget to thank the amazing group of friends I have made through the Master of Information program – you are intelligent, strong, and deeply supportive and I will make sure we stay in touch after graduation.

Of course, my heartfelt thanks go to my advisory team and research participants – none of this was possible without their trust, support, and time. I want to emphasize that this research truly would not have gone anywhere if it were not for my incredible, strong, and resilient Afghan- Canadian diaspora.

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It is profoundly difficult to express how thankful I am for genuine, reliable friends – you know who you are – that have been there for me since the beginning. You made sure my head was high, back straight, and mind at ease when times were dark and uncertain.

And, finally, I thank my family. Despite knowing that an academic career is a difficult path, their love and support is unwavering and truly knows no bounds. I dedicate this thesis to my parents who have sacrificed mind, body, and soul for their children, suffered war and violence to give them a better life, and who have made me the independent, honest, and resilient woman I am today. My will and work does not exist without them. I do not exist without my parents.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to acknowledge this sacred land on which the University of Toronto operates. It has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. The meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and I am grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory.

It is especially personal for me to think about long-time settlement experiences and be on this land and territory. As a former Afghan refugee to this land, I have often felt a connection and sisterhood with the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. In a sense, I have often felt as though my Afghan diaspora is holding hands in solidarity with the Indigenous people. Although I recognize that our experiences and contexts today differ, the Afghan people have also been affected by the violence and murder of the White oppressor and settler-colonialism. As a result of the September 11th attacks, literally 18 years ago, my country was invaded by Western powers and the result was - and still is - violence, murder, and the mass displacement of millions of Afghans. We, the Afghans in Canada, were forced to settle outside of our traditional lands and in a settler-state. For this reason, I feel especially grateful to live and work on this territory.

TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT ...... v TABLE OF CONTENTS...... vi POETRY ...... viii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 6 1.1 Chapter Overview ...... 6 1.2 Afghan-Canadian Studies ...... 6 1.3 History of Ethnic Archiving ...... 13 1.4 Identity-based Community Archiving ...... 17 1.5 Chapter Summary ...... 21 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH PROCESS, METHODS & FINDINGS ...... 23 2.1 Chapter Overview ...... 23 2.2 The Research Ethics Board Review Process ...... 23 2.2.1 A story left untold ...... 26 2.3 Methods: Critical Ethnography ...... 29 2.4 Methods: Improvisation Theory ...... 31 2.5 Assembling the Advisory Team ...... 33 2.6 Setting the Stage: The Participants ...... 36 2.7 Grounded Theory: Memoing & Coding: ...... 40 2.8 Findings ...... 43 2.8.1 Symbolic Annihilation ...... 43 2.8.2 Community Archiving & Archival Pedagogy ...... 48 2.8.3 Assimilation/Integration ...... 55 2.9 Finishing Up ...... 62 2.10 Chapter Summary ...... 62 CHAPTER 3: DIGITAL DESIGN ...... 64 3.1 Chapter Overview ...... 64 3.2 Digital Archive Rationale...... 64 3.3 Speculative Computing ...... 65

3.3.1 Speculative Computing in My Research ...... 67 3.4 Digital Design Process ...... 68 3.4.1 Theme ...... 70 3.4.2 Website Content ...... 70 3.4.3 Required Features ...... 75 3.5 Chapter Summary ...... 77 CONCLUSION ...... 78 Chapter Overview ...... 78 Thesis Summary ...... 78 Implications for Future Research ...... 80 On/About Afghan-Canadians by Afghan-Canadians ...... 80 The Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives (ACDA) ...... 81 REFERENCES...... 83

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POETRY

Each chapter of this thesis begins with a short poem written by an Afghan-Canadian female poet of the diaspora. I chose to begin each chapter this way because I want to emphasize that I am constantly inspired, challenged, and motivated by incredible Afghan-Canadian women every single day. The least I can do to recognize their tireless labour and passionate activism for the community is to give them space.

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INTRODUCTION

During the 2018-2019 academic year, I conducted a research study for my Master of Information thesis using critical ethnography and iterative digital design methodologies to understand the knowledge-making and identity-formation processes of the long-time settled Afghan diaspora in Canada. The study’s aim was to assess the digital archival needs of a slice of the diaspora to inform the creation of a proof-of-concept digital archive, called the Afghan-Canadian Digital Archive (ACDA).

The Afghan diaspora in Canada is a fairly newer immigrant group in the larger context of Canadian immigration history, especially when compared to many former immigrant communities that can attest to multiple generations of Canadian settlement and who have carved themselves into the Canadian identity throughout time, to an extent that their “Canadian-ness” is undisputed. Forced to flee homes ravaged by violence and war largely evoked by Western powers, most of the Afghan diaspora began to settle in Canada as refugees from the late 1970’s to the present-day. Very few of them would have chosen to leave their ancestral homelands before this time, before the West became involved in their lives. As four decades of continuous war and violence still devastates Afghanistan today, the Afghan diaspora are not without obstacles in their new country, a state built by settler colonialism. Endless war and violence in the country and the mainstream media coverage about it for the last four decades have shaped the prevailing narratives on Afghan-Canadians and have especially influenced how the majority of Canadian society perceives them. Eve Tuck (2009)1 explains that these skewed, negative narratives in research and media perpetuate and reinforce “damage-centred” representations of the community. The Afghan diaspora in Canada has not been able to escape from damage- centered perceptions of their identity based mostly on events in Afghanistan despite the four decades of lived experiences in Canada.

It is especially important to document this diaspora group in Canada because the war in Afghanistan has unjustly caused many Afghan-Canadians to be targets of racism, discrimination, and Islamophobia. As a result, Afghan-Canadians find themselves in situations where they are

1 Eve Tuck’s article will be discussed further in Chapter 2.

called upon to prove their “Canadian-ness” - their integration into Canadian society, even though Canada is a country built by settlers fleeing persecution in their own countries. To purposefully document their lived experiences on a digital archive accurately, faithfully, and in their own words is to counter the prevailing, misleading narratives and is, thus, an act of social justice. It is to seek many truths instead of perpetuating one singular, false and damaging narrative. In order to engage with issues of discrimination and integration, this thesis will discuss assimilation theory in the context of the Afghan-Canadian community and its application in digital archiving practice.

The documentation of Afghan-Canadian lived experiences on a digital archive ultimately also serves to educate the community of itself as a vital pedagogical resource in a polarizing educational environment where BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) communities do not see themselves in mandatory curricula across the country. As this community learns more about itself, the digital archive as a pedagogical resource fills in a gap in Canadian history and identity that is missing in traditional textbooks. While the labour of Afghan-Canadian storytelling on the ACDA will create a pedagogical resource for the community by the community, my research also leads to a critique of current archival pedagogy for its failings to consider critical race theory in its theory and praxis. Community archives could offer much- needed curricular support for BIPOC pedagogies at all levels of schooling and archival scholars can be part of this transformation by taking leadership in the creation and support of community archival initiatives.

As will become evident in Chapter 2 and 3, an objective of this research is to demonstrate how a digital archive can serve a marginalized, diaspora community and its identity-formation processes. Crucial to this conversation for Afghan-Canadians is their symbolic annihilation in mainstream Canadian media. Symbolic annihilation is defined as the misrepresentation or silence of an identity-based community in the media by a dominant culture (Tuchman 1978) and is applied to archival practices by Michelle Caswell (2016)2. This thesis also attempts to build on the concept of symbolic annihilation by demonstrating how minoritized identities within the

2 This concept will be discussed at length in Chapter 2.

Afghan-Canadian community also face symbolic annihilation by a dominant, mainstream Afghan-Canadian identity.

Chronicling the stories and lived experiences of ethnic minorities in Canada has been a slow- growing endeavour in the Canadian archival field. The Canadian archival model adheres to a “total archives” concept that emphasizes the documentation of all aspects of Canadian society, from the ordinary citizen to the famous, wealthy elites. “Total archives” refers to the expansion of archival collecting priorities, focusing not just on government records, corporate activities or elite members of society but, in order to have a full picture of Canadian society, to also attempt at documenting all aspects of Canadian society in all forms of media. The aim of a total archives approach is to provide an accurate representation of society. But what does it mean to document all aspects of Canadian history and how do we present a full picture of Canadian society? In order to fulfill this “total archives” objective, the Canadian archival system must also seek to illustrate the diversity of Canadian society. In the Afghan-Canadian community context, applying a “total archives” concept means also considering the intersectional experiences— including intersections across different Afghan and other ethnicities, migration experiences, age, gender, language ability, socio-economic class, education, religion, sexuality— of the identity- based community. The feminist framework of “intersectionality” was first initiated by Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1991). I have found Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge’s definition in Intersectionality (2016) most helpful as I have pursued this project:

Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world... When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves (p. 2).

However, as mentioned previously, mainstream society largely possesses damage-centered perceptions of the Afghan-Canadian community. This stems from an oversaturated media focus on the war and violence in Afghanistan but can also be attributed to the absence of this diaspora community in Canadian archival collections. A scan of archives across Canada generated a huge gap of invisible stories and lived experiences from the Afghan-Canadian community despite the

four decades of settlement. No cultural authority had a collecting priority to tell their tales. If a member of the diaspora, or even a non-Afghan Canadian, were to conduct a quick search on the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) database to find more on their community with the keyword “Afghan,” what will consistently appear are records pertaining to Canada’s participation in the war in Afghanistan or the travels of a white man - whether as a visitor or soldier - through the “exotic” lands of Afghanistan. On the other hand, as will be discussed in Chapter 1, academic studies largely tend to target newly-arrived Afghan diaspora members in Canada (less than 10 years of settlement) to assess their integration experiences, especially the barriers to settlement. When Canadian mainstream media, academia, and major archival institutions fixate almost exclusively on damage-centered narratives of the Afghan diaspora in Canada, how can the history, representation, diversity, and lived realities of Afghan-Canadians be accurately reflected in Canadian society?

Finally, this study utilizes critical ethnography to understand how the Afghan diaspora in Canada engages with their hyphenated identity, media representation, and to assess their digital archival needs in an attempt to begin the process of talking back to the negative stereotypes placed on to the community as a whole. As a result, I conducted a critical ethnography of an ethnically diverse group of long-time settled Afghan-Canadians (10 or more years in Canada) in their 20’s and used an iterative design method to create a proof-of-concept digital archives, The Afghan- Canadian Digital Archives (ACDA) , informed by oral history interviews with research participants. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, a critical ethnographic approach emphasizes the creation of space and a platform for the stories and voices of silenced and marginalized identities by using the critical ethnographer’s own privileges, skills, and networks as a researcher. Furthermore, ethnography also allows for themes, concepts, and theoretical categories to emerge from data collection - in this case, oral history interviews - and, therefore, a critical ethnographer does not begin the research with a hypothesis they want to test. A critical ethnographer lets the data speak.

Positionality

As a critical ethnographer, I must also acknowledge my own positionality to the research and understand the powers at play. I am an Afghan-Canadian woman. I have had the privilege of being educated at both the undergraduate and graduate level (Master’s) at the University of

Toronto. A former refugee now Canadian citizen, I have been living in Canada for almost 20 years and have a personal stake in this research. I can attest to racist and Islamophobic attacks directed toward me, especially in elementary and high school. So-called “funny” questions like “Is your father Osama bin Ladin?” occurred occasionally. Non-Afghan classmates used to ask me quite often if I had bombs in my backpack. “They’re only jokes,” they said. But I was exhausted from trying to educate them and from working hard to counter such negative stereotypes on my own. The motivation for this research quite obviously also stems from my personal, lived experiences as an Afghan-Canadian.

Thesis Structure

Following this Introduction, this thesis will provide a literature review (Chapter 1) of research conducted on Afghan-Canadians as well as the state of ethnic archiving in Canada. Chapter 2 will explicitly outline my research process, chosen methodology, rationale, as well as the findings from the data collection. Chapter 3 focuses on illustrating the digital design methodology used for the private proof-of-concept digital archives and how the interviews informed the digital archival needs of the participants, an intersection of the Afghan diaspora in Canada. Finally, the Conclusion aims to weave all the chapters together to present concrete conclusions developed from this research as well as provide suggestions for future research.

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

“Anyone who darkens your spirit, doesn’t have any light to give you.” – Laila Re, Untitled

1.1 Chapter Overview

This chapter will focus on surveying academic literature related to this thesis. First, it will engage with literature on Afghan-Canadian settlement experiences and then move into research that has already been conducted on ethnic or identity-based community archiving. In general, the Afghan diaspora in Canada has been a part of many studies concerned with their immediate or recent settlement experiences; they are a large refugee and immigrant population in the country and, naturally, social service agencies are often examined to determine their effectiveness. A review of the literature concerned with documenting ethnic identities follows the studies on Afghan-Canadians. Literature on research methodology will be discussed in Chapter 2.

1.2 Afghan-Canadian Studies

Most studies on Afghan-Canadians focus on the settlement practices of the Afghan diaspora in Canada, their experiences integrating into Canadian society in the first few years of arrival, the immediate effects of a new culture and language on different generations, and the ways in which Canadian social service agencies are failing these newcomers. Furthermore, many of these studies also often take comparative approaches and methodologies by comparing the settlement practices of two or more ethnic groups. Nazilla Khanlou, Jane G. Koh, and Catriona Mill’s (2008) “Cultural identity and experiences of prejudice and discrimination of Afghan and Iranian immigrant youth” is an example of a comparative essay that delves into the experiences and effects of discrimination on cultural identity formation for Afghan and Iranian immigrant youth. The participants of the study reported that school was one of the first places that they experienced discrimination against their ethnic group particularly because of “prejudicial attitudes regarding world events in the Middle East and religious faiths” (Khanlou et al., p. 502) and media misrepresentation. The authors deduced that the discriminatory actions and remarks led to “personal strength and resilience as a coping reaction” (Khanlou et al., p. 506) which

influenced an increased enthusiasm for one’s own cultural identity. The study suggests that Afghan and Iranian immigrant youth usually rationalize discriminatory remarks against themselves as jokes but “perceived higher levels of discrimination directed at their group as a whole” (Khanlou et al., p. 509) because it is easier to cope with discrimination when attributing it to one’s ethnic group. Khanlou et al. report that despite constantly facing discrimination and prejudice, both groups agreed that they have a positive view of Canada and its multiculturalism. This particular study exemplifies the resilience of Afghan refugees and immigrants in Canada. The Afghan participants in the study revealed that the prejudice they faced led them to an increased awareness of their identity in Canada but the scope of the study does not allow the researchers to delve deeper into their identity and their sense of representation.

In a similar vein, Michaela Hynie, Sepali Guruge and Yogendra B. Shakya’s (2013) “Family Relationships of Afghan, Karen and Sudanese Refugee Youth” also conducted a comparative ethnographic study by interviewing Afghan, Karen and Sudanese refugee youths in Toronto to determine whether acculturation gaps and role reversals lead to family conflicts and distress. Hynie et al. (2013) found that many youths had to take on more responsibilities in the family and help their parents navigate the systems of their new country because the youths were able to adapt to the new culture and language much more quickly than their parents. The authors determined from the interviews that the increased responsibilities and role reversals demonstrated by the youths and their families did not lead to significant family conflicts or disintegration of family harmony but the youths complained that their parents’ increased control over their children and the general lack of support from them caused family strife. Finally, they suggest that increased stress to be the leaders of their families should not be left on the youths’ shoulders, calling for policy changes in settlement and social service agencies. Although the study is further proof of the strength and resilience of refugee groups, unfortunately, the practice of comparing the settlement experiences of different ethnicities often means that a study does not dedicate rigorous and in-depth effort into the surrounding context, issues, and identities of a single ethnicity. As a result, they only focus on the differences between two or more ethnicities; in essence, similar to a competition. In Khanlou et al. (2008) and Hynie et al. (2013), we see that comparative ethnographic studies on settlement experiences often do not concentrate on the variables, contexts, and diverse identities of a single ethnicity and, therefore, end up homogenizing the ethnic groups that they study.

A focus on suffering and damage is prevalent among most studies of the Afghan diaspora in Canada as a means to force change. Similar to the studies by Hynie et al. (2013) and Khanlou et al. (2008), Parin Dossa’s (2008) “Creating politicized spaces: Afghan immigrant women’s stories of migration and displacement” pointedly emphasizes how the suggestions and advice derived from her analysis are meant for policy makers to make changes to social service agencies according to the failures she uncovers in her study (p. 20). The article focuses on the suffering of her Afghan-Canadian participants, their perilous journeys to Canada, and their lost relatives as a way to pressure policy-makers for change. Dossa begins by having the participants talk about the destruction of Afghanistan and then subsequently about their own wounded bodies, worries, and struggles in Canada in order to “establish a politicized link between the two countries: ‘here’ and ‘there’” (p. 14). By fixating on a marginalized community’s misery and brokenness to inspire change in policy, the studies subsequently also perpetuate and reinforce their “damage-centred” representations. Eve Tuck (2009) explains that “the danger in damage-centered research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (Tuck 2009, 414). According to Tuck, marginalized communities permit this kind of representation because it is the quickest and easiest way “for correcting oppression” (Tuck 2009, 414) that the communities face. One way to counter the damage-centred studies on Afghan-Canadians is to employ Tuck’s research strategy of focusing on desire: while it is important to reveal the pain, it is also equally critical to acknowledge the wisdom and hope prevalent in the community. This ensures that the community is more wholly represented.

Although Dossa’s study does not set two different ethnicities against each other like Khanlou et al. (2008) and Hynie et al. (2012), Dossa encourages her Afghan participants to consistently compare their lives in Canada and Afghanistan. Hynie et al. (2012) follows this precedent and also has their participants compare their lives in Canada and Afghanistan by drawing pictures of themselves in Canada and back home, which could have evidently led them to keep a comparative framework in mind when they answered the researchers’ questions. Both Dossa and Hynie et al. lead their participants to compare and contrast their experiences in two different countries; comparison is often the easiest way to explain an experience or event. However, as is evident in both studies, the participants often focused on the things they lacked in one county versus the other or came to the somber realization that certain aspects of their lives are or were better in one place versus the other. This constant comparative mindset focuses too much on the

past and does not allow the Afghan participants to think deeply about their identity in the contexts of their present reality.

While it is unintentional, some studies do not take cultural protocols into account because the researchers are usually not Afghan themselves and, so, they make assumptions about the Afghan diaspora in Canada without consultation with any Afghan-Canadian community members. While Hynie et al. (2013) drew advice from a group of community members and academics familiar with the Afghan diaspora community, a study by Shiva Nourpanah in 2014 titled “A Study of the Experiences of Integration and Settlement of Afghan Government-Assisted Refugees in Halifax, Canada” seemed to rely on a single Iranian translator that often worked with Afghan refugees. She attempts to determine the settlement experiences and assimilation processes of Afghan government-assisted refugees (GARs) in Halifax, Canada solely through large family interviews. The overarching theme gained from this article is that Afghans have nuanced, varied identities and are a heterogeneous population that have, unfortunately, been represented in the media and mainstream society as “silent, suffering victims of circumstance” (Nourpanah 2014, 57). Through the interviews, she believes that “there is a sense of mutual accommodation and tolerance” (Nourpanah 2014, 62) amongst the parents and children of the study group: the parents give their children the freedom to make their own choices when they grow older and the youths “actively try to accommodate” (Nourpanah 2014, 62) their parents’ traditional values. She further explains that her participants expressed different degrees of religiosity: some of the participants looked to religion as a “familiar social practice” (Nourpanah 2014, 64) while other families thought religion was “backward” and constricting. In general, we learn that the participants are constantly reconstructing their identities and values, especially grappling with the idea of “Afghan-ness”, as they go about their lives in Canada.

As mentioned previously, the homogenization of the Afghan diaspora is prevalent in many research studies, especially those without direct consultation with Afghan-Canadians themselves. In this study specifically, Nourpanah assumes the religiosity of her participants by donning a hijab, an Islamic headdress for women, when meeting participants. Previous recruitment strategies having been fruitless, she found participants at a mosque and a multicultural potluck by wearing full hijab, something she normally does not wear; she may have made the assumption that her potential participants were all practicing Muslims because Afghanistan’s official religion

is Islam and it is an Islamic Republic. Although she begins her research with this viewpoint on the Afghan diaspora, she realizes afterwards the errors in some of her methods:

Although I appreciate that ‘the goal of establishing true rapport requires honesty of the researcher,’ I felt rather dishonest showing up for those interviews while continuing to wear the hijab, but they had first seen me in full hijab, and I would have felt foolish and unwelcome if I had gone bare-headed. I strategically took my little daughter with me, to cement my position as a friendly, non-threatening, motherly, harmless figure, and a box of cookies... (Nourpanah 2014, 60)

Another common element that most studies have is the tendency to rely on settlement or social service agencies to find participants for research studies. This is probably the case because of, as mentioned above, the intended audience: most of the studies aim to provide criticism, advice and feedback for government policy makers and social service agencies. As a result, the studies recruit participants from settlement agencies which often only have contact with the most recent Afghan refugees and immigrants in Canada. Therefore, these studies exclude any Afghan- Canadians that have long since left the care and services of an agency or, perhaps, never utilized a settlement agency in the first place. Nourpanah (2014), for example, used an Iranian translator who worked with government-assisted refugees specifically to acquaint her but also went to spaces, such as the mosque, where Afghans in Halifax, Nova Scotia often gathered. Dossa (2008) spent three years in the field and briefly mentions locating her subjects through social service organizations and implementing a snowballing strategy once a few participants were found. The participants in Khanlou et al.’s (2008) study were found mostly through the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI), a group of social service agencies. Hynie et al. (2013) did not exclusively use social service agencies, however, they do admit to contacting community centres as well as using a variety of other recruitment strategies: Facebook, announcements at events, flyer distribution through key youth associations and community centres, word of mouth, telephone and school presentations.

A 2009 study by Julie A.C. Stack and Yoshitaka Iwasaki titled “The role of leisure pursuits in adaptation processes among Afghan refugees who have immigrated to Winnipeg, Canada” concentrated on assessing the settlement support received by Afghan immigrants in Winnipeg, Canada through 11 semi-structured interviews with refugees that had arrived in less than 5 years.

The authors determined one overarching theme: “the role of meaningful, purposeful and enjoyable leisure in adapting to new challenges in the lives of Afghan refugees during the process of immigrating to the host community” (p. 253). The researchers in this study targeted newly-arrived Afghan refugees by contacting the International Centre of Winnipeg, a non-profit settlement agency, and from there they implemented a snowballing strategy to find more participants. This study is slightly different from the previously-mentioned studies that used settlement agencies to find participants: Stack and Iwasaki actually set out from the beginning with the intention of only looking at Afghan-Canadians that had arrived in less than 5 years. Unlike the previous studies, Stack and Iwasaki decisively look to interview a specific, identified group of Afghan-Canadians within the larger Afghan-Canadian community. Rather than extrapolating findings based on research about one portion of the Afghan-Canadian diaspora to make generalizations about all Afghan-Canadians, this study admits to the multiplicity of identities of the Afghan-Canadian community and specifically focuses on those that have lived in Winnipeg for the last 5 years.

One study by Lisa Quirke (2011), entitled “Exploring the Settlement Experiences and Information Practices of Afghan Newcomer Youth in Toronto,” did not seem to have a government or settlement agency audience. The author attempts to uncover the settlement experiences, information practices, and related leisure activities of 7 Afghan youth in Toronto through semi-structured interviews and participant observations in this article. As well as interviewing the 7 youth, all of whom had lived in Canada for less than 10 years, Quirke also complemented their experiences by interviewing settlement workers that have dealt with Afghan youth in the past. In relation to their settlement experiences, the author finds that her Afghan participants are largely heterogeneous in terms of education, ethnicity and language, and especially points out that their journeys to Canada vary considerably. She concludes that the Afghan youth mostly acquired their information from family, friends, classmates or settlement workers. Interestingly, because of a history of conflict between ethnic groups in Afghanistan, the ethnicity of an Afghan settlement worker seemed to determine whether the newcomer would trust the settlement worker or not. Finally, Quirke uncovered that the Afghan youth regularly engaged with “information technologies” (p. 350) such as Facebook and YouTube in order to connect with their friends and family around the world, share news and events concerning Afghanistan, and learn more about Islam. Considering the purpose of her study, Quirke clearly

focused on how information institutions could better serve the Afghan youth in Toronto. Her audience was information institutions. For this reason, Quirke did not seek out settlement agencies for participant recruitment and instead relied heavily on participant observation by attending multiple events run by the Afghan community and interviewing a handful of willing Afghan-Canadian participants for her study. Both Hynie et al. (2012) and Quirke (2011) were probably able to get the most diverse range of participants in terms of their citizenship status and years in Canada.

As I already knew as an Afghan-Canadian myself, most of the studies concluded that the Afghan-Canadian community is incredibly heterogeneous with shockingly intersectional identities: they discovered diversity on ethnic, linguistic, age, and socioeconomic lines. Lisa Quirke’s research also determined that conflict amongst ethnic groups in Afghanistan has spilled over into Canada with subtle forms of discrimination; for example, refusing a settlement worker based on their Afghan ethnic identity (Quirke 2011, 350). The Afghan diaspora in Canada is well aware of these ethnic conflicts and this finding only strengthens my argument for a more in- depth, thorough, and desire-centred research study on the community in order to get a more representative picture. A final point I want to make is that the aforementioned studies (Hynie et al. 2012; Quirke 2011; Nourpanah 2014; Stack & Iwasaki 2009; Khanlou et al. 2008; Dossa 2008) all either used only Farsi-speaking Afghan participants in Canada or they did not bother to mention the primary Afghan languages of their participants. Considering the linguistic diversity of Afghanistan, it would be a practice of exclusion to not also include Afghan-Canadians with other primary Afghan languages such as Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. I recognize that many older Pashto speakers that had grown up in Afghanistan may also know Farsi as a second language and, therefore, may be reflected in one or more studies but I firmly believe that if some of them were given the chance to speak in their native tongue (Pashto) their narrative may be slightly different or at least richer.

As illustrated, the majority of studies conducted on or about the Afghan diaspora in Canada tends to focus on subject populations/participant pools of Afghans that have lived in Canada for a short amount of time - often less than 10 years - and that are immigrants or refugees. Because many of these studies try to enlist the help of settlement agencies, the researchers receive participants that are newly-arrived immigrants or refugees and further distance themselves from a growing

population of Afghan diaspora members that have lived in Canada for 10 or more years or who were born in Canada. Furthermore, the audience for many of the studies seem to be policy makers and settlement agencies as the research projects often find comments, criticisms, and suggestions of current immigrant integration practices. There is very little to show for Afghan- Canadians that do not center around settlement experiences.

1.3 History of Ethnic Archiving

In order to discuss current ethnic or identity-based archiving practices, it is important to first explore the history of these practices in North American institutions. In her influential historical survey titled “Archival representations of immigration and ethnicity in North American history: From the ethnicization of archives to the archivization of ethnicity”, Dominique Daniel (2014) provides a thorough account of the history of ethnic archiving initiatives conducted by mainstream archival institutions in North America. She divides the history up into two parts to reflect the major ethnic archiving trends: the “ethnicization” of archives and the later “archivization” of ethnicity.

The 1960’s and early 1970’s saw “the rise of generations of hyphenated citizens” (Daniel 2014, 176) and the subsequent acceptance of “ethnic traits...[as] part of a dynamic and changing identity” (Daniel 2014, 177). With the rise of increased immigration to North America by Western European immigrants and ethnic groups, archival institutions began to collect documents from families, associations, and community groups that they had previously neglected in order to purposefully represent these ethnic groups in their collections. Unfortunately, they quickly began to run into issues. Mainstream archival institutions relied on the self-identification of ethnic groups and did not do further research on them, leading to poorly-constructed and unorganized collection practices for their ethnic materials. For example, it is quite difficult to determine if someone is “ethnic” or not if they have mixed ethnic identities, do not personally identify with any perceived ethnic labels or if their archival materials have nothing to do with their ethnicity. The reality quickly became a matter of “White” versus “Other”: if the materials belonged to a person of colour, they were often considered part of an archives’ ethnic collection rather than existing on their own without any labels.

In the later 1970s and 1980s, archival institutions shifted to promoting two mandates for their ethnic collections after realizing their errors in the past: “fighting ethnic stereotypes and promoting true understanding through scholarly work and public education” (Daniel 2014, 182). Daniel, however, argues that many archival institutions only focused on one part of their agenda over the other. By concentrating on the social justice aspect of the mandates, they risked skewing the representation of an ethnic group. For example, the director of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario feared that their overemphasis on “ethnic groups’ achievements and hardships rather than less glamorous aspects of day-to-day life” (Daniel 2014, 182) could have a detrimental effect on their commitment to collecting “everyday” archival materials for researchers. Daniel explains that it is around this time that we see the rise of the “essentialization” of ethnicity, forcing ethnic groups to present homogeneous versions of their identity for political advantage and so-called “simpler” representation in government. Archival institutions perpetuated this agenda by collecting materials from “easily-identifiable” ethnic groups and organizations “that had clear ethnic content” (Daniel 2014, 183) and, thus, forcibly silencing “complicated” ethnic communities. It is clear that multifarious identities within ethnic groups were not taken seriously in archival institutions at this time as homogenized versions of ethnic groups were preferred.

As waves of new non-Western European immigrants began to flood North America in the 1980s and 1990s, grassroots community archives began to pop up to “record and preserve the histories and identities of local, transnational or marginalized communities, either in collaboration with established institutions or in opposition to them” (Daniel 2014, 185). The rise of community archival initiatives came about while mainstream archival institutions began to shift from places of archival collection to places of “production of information” (Daniel 2014, 187) as they recognized their role in co-creating history and archival collections. In his foundational piece on the history of archival theory titled “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift”, Terry Cook (1997) identifies this paradigm shift from “impartial custodians of inherited records” (Cook 1997, 46) to stewards of information as archivists began to realize that they were “very active builders of their own ‘houses of memory’” (Cook 1997, 46). According to Daniel, the paradigm shift marks the beginning of the “archivization” of ethnicity. Following the 1990’s and in an effort to meaningfully document ethnic groups, participatory archiving projects modelled on indigenous archival efforts sprang up

to finally recognize the multiple identities of under-represented communities. Archives began to stop seeking the “authentic” version of an ethnic group but realized that this feat was impossible considering the vast diversity of identities that could be represented in a single ethnic community.

In “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms”, Terry Cook (2013) identifies four specific critical paradigm shifts in archival theory beginning at the end of the French Revolution, however, it is the last three that largely coincide with Daniel’s (2014) historical survey of ethnic archiving practices. While archives dedicated themselves to their juridical duty of providing evidence for activities from the French Revolution onwards in the first paradigm shift, Cook explains that the 1930’s saw the emergence of archiving for academic research, specifically the creation of cultural and historical memory, as the second paradigm shift. This is when we see the beginnings of archivist interference: archivists began to consciously collect, describe, and arrange materials albeit “through the filter of academic history” (Cook 2013, 108). This second paradigm shift, memory, fits well with the rise of the active collection of archival materials from Western European individuals, families and associations in the 1960’s and early 1970’s.

The third paradigm shift, identity, coincides with Daniel’s (2014) explanation for the rise of community archival initiatives in opposition to mainstream institutions in the 1980’s and 1990’s. According to Cook (2013), in the wake of postmodernism, this was a time when archives became more closely linked to social justice and human rights movements while the archival profession began to carve out its own identity through post-graduate programmes. These degree programs allowed archivists to be experts in records and gave them the authority to make archival arrangement, description and appraisal decisions to professionalize their institutions like they had never done before. As Daniel (2014) mentioned, archival institutions now saw themselves as stewards of information, and attempted “to reflect ‘the broad spectrum of human experience’ not just that of the records creators nor select groups of elite users” (Cook 2013, 110). The professional archivist began to understand the intersectional frameworks in society and attempted to address these concerns in their practices, coinciding with the wave of non-Western European immigration to North America.

Nevertheless, community archives did not feel the third paradigm shift in larger archival institutions was enough. According to Cook (2013), we are currently in the fourth paradigm shift, community. This archival paradigm shift focuses on participatory archiving, empowering identity-based archives, and community consultation. With the Internet and digital technologies at one’s disposal, it is easier than ever for identity-based communities to represent themselves without handing over their archives to larger, mainstream institutions for long-term preservation. These communities rely on their archives to consistently create and renegotiate their own sense of identity in today’s society. According to Cook (2013), community archives are hesitant to hand over their archives to larger institutions because they fear them asserting their authority, control and power over their identity (p. 114). Luckily, this paradigm shift calls for the empowerment of community and identity-based archives. Furthermore, in their role as stewards of knowledge, larger archival institutions are now more willing to allow the archived community group to participate in the arrangement, description and appraisal of their community’s materials (Cook, 2013). Mainstream institutions are also increasingly consulting with the communities that are prevalent in their archival holdings and archivists have become more open to learning about the non-traditional or community-specific ways that groups create history, memory-make and/or perform their identity (Cook, 2013). This fourth paradigm shift aligns with Daniel’s idea of participatory archiving with ethnic groups based on initial efforts in the indigenous community and the archivists’ embrace of intersectional, varied identities. Both Daniel’s (2014) and Cook’s (2013) articles provide a thorough overview together of past archival trends in theory and practice so that we may understand current archival practices today, especially in ethnic or identity-based archiving.

During this fourth paradigm shift, Joel Wurl became an early theorist on ethnic archiving. In his 2005 article titled “Ethnicity As Provenance: In Search Of Values And Principles For Documenting The Immigrant Experience”, Wurl attempts to identify the important factors involved in ethnic archiving and the issues in current archival theory and practice that hinder adequate representation of diaspora communities. Wurl calls for a change in the idea of provenance and explains that “ethnicity is manifested in interpersonal and interdependent frameworks - frameworks that need to be understood and respected as embodiments of provenance” (Wurl 2005, 69). He warns that archival institutions usually treat ethnicity “as a subject area or ‘theme’” (Wurl 2005, 69) and further encourages the idea of archival stewardship

in ethnic archiving specifically because it forces archivists to treat archival material from an ethnic community “less as property and more as cultural asset, jointly held and invested in by the archive and the community of origin” (Wurl 2005, 72). Wurl was clearly an early proponent for participatory archiving practices and saw the merit in ethnic archiving itself.

Katie Shilton and Ramesh Srinivasan (2007) further elucidate and add to Wurl’s concepts. They encourage mainstream archival institutions to rectify past errors by implementing participatory ethnic archiving practices in their article “Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections”. Shilton and Srinivasan believe that mainstream archival institutions can remedy their abysmal lack of records on marginalized communities and resist “creating archives about rather than of communities” (Shilton & Srinivasan 2007, 89) by broadening their ideas of traditional archival principles such as contextual knowledge, respect des fonds, original order, and arrangement and description. For example, capturing the context of records is a principle dating back to Sir Hilary Jenkinson and Theodore R. Schellenberg’s times but the authors suggest extending this idea by allowing the marginalized communities to participate in creating the narratives surrounding their own records and, in turn, revealing the contexts of creation for their records. The purpose of the article is to show traditional, mainstream archival institutions that their principles can be retained even with a participatory model of archiving if only they allow a broadening of the definitions of those principles.

While archiving ethnicity has changed over time according to different waves of immigration and social justice movements in the past, 21st century archival theorists such as Wurl, Shilton, and Srinivasan mentioned above have attempted to provide solutions for mainstream institutions. Ultimately, as suggested by Cook, we are in the fourth paradigm shift which is why many ethnic and other identity-based communities do not feel that community consultation or the widening of traditional archival principles would be enough to accurately document their lived experiences. The next section will explore how identity-based communities such as ethnic groups are commanding the reigns of history-making through community archiving.

1.4 Identity-based Community Archiving

As seen above, the early 2000’s seemed to favour participatory approaches with mainstream archival institutions - many of which did not represent or were never part of the ethnic

communities that they sought to archive. A more contemporary practice, identity-based community archiving is a different concept. In “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy, and the Mainstream,” Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd (2009) explain that a community is “any manner of people who come together and present themselves as such, and a ‘community archive’ is the product of their attempts to document the history of their commonality” (Flinn et al. 2009, 75). Community ethnic or identity-based archives are archives run by the ethnic or identity-based group. With this definition of community archives in mind, archival theorists such as Michelle Caswell explain in “'To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing': Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives” (2016) that “the creation of community archives can be seen as a form of political protest in that it is an attempt to seize the means by which history is written and correct or amend dominant stories about the past” (Caswell 2016, 13) and, thus, are often in stark opposition to mainstream institutions.

Contrary to the trend of empowering community archival initiatives, there are some archival scholars that argue against focusing on identity in an archive. Through a case study of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), in “Community archives and the limitations of identity: considering discursive impact on material needs”, Cristine Paschild (2012) argues that ethnic-based community archives that focus squarely on accommodating all identities of an ethnic group often “segregate” themselves from mainstream archival institutions that could provide them with assistance in regards to adopting professional practice and theory. She explains, as an example, that JANM faced an identity crisis when descendants of Japanese Americans began to express far more complex identities than they had previously encountered and scrambled to accommodate them, leading to JANM’s neglect of its “institutional identity”, concrete archival theory, and professional practice. The author argues that emphasizing community/ethnic identity and subjectivity will marginalize identity-based community archives in the larger archival community of mainstream institutions. She maintains that community archives are doing themselves a disservice by implementing “postmodern-influenced theory” (Paschild 2012, 141) because she believes that it is not compatible with “sound, sustainable policies and practices” (Paschild 2012, 141) based on professional archival training. The article points out that many of the issues surrounding intersectional identities and representation that community archives are currently facing are also issues that mainstream institutions are presently

dealing with. In her opinion, identity-based community archives should implement professional practice and theory in order to join the larger archival community and, thus, be able to share ideas with or learn from mainstream institutions. In this way, community archives can more easily request help from larger institutions to align further policies in professional practice. However, most of the issues she brings up in the study could be easily rectified if a newly- created archives simply implemented policies and procedures rooted in postmodern-influenced theories of identity such as Wurl’s (2005) suggestion to consider ethnicity as provenance. It is her specific case study of the Japanese American National Museum that, unfortunately, had not had the chance to do so.

In an article titled “Inventing New Archival Imaginaries: Theoretical Foundations for Identity- Based Community Archives”, Caswell (2014b) acknowledges that many ethnic communities have been defined by those outside of that ethnic community. For example, governments may create ethnic labels based on very little research for the purposes of stream-lined administration. These ethnic categories may not reflect how the communities would self-identify themselves. However, Caswell explains that these categories are necessary for mobilization against the ethnic categories themselves. By mobilizing under the false and forced ethnic category, we can subsequently “denaturalize” or fight against them for a more representative and just future. Greg Bak and Tina Mai Chen (2014) argue that ethnic minority communities in Canada “are the result of statistical record-keeping” (Bak & Chen 2014, 209) that require individuals to place themselves in specific categories for the benefit of government regulation. These are “communities of compulsion, communities of regulation” (Bak & Chen 2014, 209) and may not always reflect the sentiments of the people themselves. Although almost all communities are socially constructed, they argue that authentic or “natural” communities are not all communities of choice, created by the individuals in that community. The authors cite the example of the Chinese-Canadian community as a community of compulsion and regulation created by the Canadian government in the late 19th century to administer the Chinese Head Tax policy. The article states that “Chinese-Canadians”3 have always been largely diverse but, over time, adopted this forced identity to “fight for redress and historical recognition for these racist policies” (Bak

3 The term “Chinese-Canadians” is in quotations because I am following the convention of the article which also used quotations around the forced identity term “Chinese-Canadians.”

& Chen 2014, 210). They cite the Head Tax Digital Archive as an example. Canada responded to the mobilization of multiple ethnic communities by creating the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP) in 2008 to provide funding for community archival and historical/heritage projects. However, despite emphasizing the importance of involving ethnic groups in heritage projects regarding their own history, the CHRP tended to fund archival projects that resembled a participatory archiving model wherein a larger, mainstream institution facilitates the archival project with participation and advice from the respective ethno-cultural group as evidenced by the Chinese Head Tax Digital Archive being run by the University of British Columbia Libraries. The article argues that this archival model does not always satisfy the communities as many see it as ironic that the CHRP would go against its own mandate by giving these archival projects to publicly-funded educational institutions instead of an identity- based community group. Nevertheless, “Chinese-Canadian” communities across Canada jumped at the chance to contribute to an archive that could allow them to engage with their intersectional realities, and challenge their mainstream representation and the forced adoption of the ethnic group created by the government.

In “‘You know you from Champaign-Urbana’: an ethnography of localized African-American archiving initiatives” (2014), Noah Lenstra explores the performance of ethnicity through traditional and non-traditional archiving projects by conducting an ethnographic study of archiving initiatives in Champaign-Urbana, the United States. The author specifically reflects on the process of creating an archiving initiative called “eBlackCU” to document the histories and cultures of African-Americans in Champaign-Urbana. Lenstra explains that a focus group for “eBlackCU” was created that included African-American community leaders, elders, teachers, professors, librarians, and activists. It revealed that each individual had different ideas about archiving ethnicity and that the varying viewpoints were, essentially, drastically different performances of the shared ethnicity in the room. Even in the past, traditional archiving initiatives, such as the physical or analogue documentation of records, led by African-American groups made careful decisions about how they were to perform their ethnic identity by choosing to keep or appraise certain African-American voices over others. The author reveals that a number of ethnic archiving initiatives centered on African-American heritage today are led by “African-Americans in largely white-led organizations [who] use the initiatives to construct a public image they feel represents the community as a whole” (Lenstra 2014, 230). While Bak

and Chen (2014) lament over the fact that Chinese-Canadians were not given the agency or authority to define their own ethnic group, Lenstra reveals that ethnic communities themselves are constantly at odds when trying to define themselves as a community as they struggle to determine the level of ethnic “performance” that is needed. They may end up with a public ethnic performance versus a private one.

The articles by Bak and Chen (2014) as well as Paschild (2012) provide advice and criticism for the field of ethnic digital archiving. Both of them emphasize the need for clear, concrete policies for long-term archiving to avoid short-lived archiving initiatives that run out of steam after government funds dry up. Paschild’s solution for short-lived community archives is to seek assistance from mainstream institutions whereas Caswell (2016) and Bak & Chen (2014) prefer authority of identity-based archives to be in the hands of the ethnic community. Unlike Paschild, Bak and Chen are not able to provide a long-term plan for ethnic community archives; they simply warn communities to avoid relying on one-time funding initiatives created by the government.

Identity-based community archival initiatives allow the community that they serve to maintain control over their own materials, descriptions, and access - their community’s stories and realities. Unfortunately, like Bak and Chen demonstrated, many of these initiatives do not receive the government support and funding that they desperately need to survive on their own and, as a result, they wind up losing control and being absorbed by a major archival institution. At the same time, even if an archival initiative is thriving, by virtue of their independence, community archival initiatives typically do not receive the same legitimacy as mainstream archives and, as Paschild asserts, tend to segregate themselves from major archival institutions.

1.5 Chapter Summary

This chapter presented the current literature on the Afghan diaspora in Canada, the state of identity-based archives, and provided a history of ethnic archiving. The Afghan diaspora in Canada has largely only been comparatively studied with other ethnic groups to identify the settlement experiences, struggles, and successes of each community. As a result of this focus on newly-arrived immigrants or refugees, the varied, lived experiences of Afghan diaspora members who were born in Canada or have lived in Canada for 10 or more years are largely absent in

Canadian research studies let alone in the Canadian archival record. Furthermore, the studies largely only used Farsi-speakers or did not deem it necessary to reveal the primary Afghan language of their participants, leaving us to question the diversity of perspectives they may have received. Ethnic archiving has only recently, in this fourth archival paradigm shift, reached importance in the Canadian archival landscape, however, mainstream archival institutions still do not actively document ethnic communities or make ethnicity a collection priority. Discontent with participatory archiving models, identity-based community archival initiatives, although working on shoestring budgets, are attempting to tell their stories based on what they, as a community, feel is important and, more importantly, in their own words. My research attempts to use a community archival model to create a digital archive for my own Afghan-Canadian community. The following chapter illustrates the process I undertook to begin this work and the findings that would ultimately inform how the community thinks about itself.

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH PROCESS, METHODS & FINDINGS

“To drown in your affection is to say I survived.” - Frishta Bastan, Untitled

2.1 Chapter Overview

The focus of this chapter is to explicitly detail my research process, methods, and the subsequent findings that emerged from my fieldwork. This chapter presents how I conducted a critical ethnography of the long-time settled Afghan-Canadian community (10 or more years in Canada) to understand how they engage with their hyphenated identity and media representation and to assess their digital archival needs all while attempting to begin the process of talking back to the negative stereotypes placed on to the community as a whole. I will first begin with the impact of the university’s Research Ethics Board review followed by explanations and rationale for my chosen research methodologies, a description of my fieldwork, and finally, the findings that emerged out of the oral history interviews with my participants.

2.2 The Research Ethics Board Review Process

Following the Faculty of Information’s approval of my thesis proposal in mid-September 2018, I was tasked with creating a Research Ethics Board (REB) application because my prospective research project included human interaction in the form of semi-structured interviews and advisory team consultation. The REB application generally asks the researcher a series of questions regarding their research project to describe the human interaction that will take place (i.e. type of interviews, drug tests, and so on), outline risks or benefits involved for participants, and create a plan to secure participant data. Depending on the type of human participant interaction, the REB will also require the researcher to submit all materials that participants will be receiving in order to judge if the participants will be fully informed of the research details and to ensure the participants officially give consent.

Before an official REB application could be started, the Faculty’s Associate Dean, Research (ADR) and the Research Funding Coordinator (RFC) had to assess and approve my draft REB worksheet, including all documents I created. Originally, the draft REB worksheet was accompanied by the following documents:

● An Information Letter and Informed Consent Form for participants ● An Information Letter and Informed Consent Form for advisory team ● Mental health resources ● A document with two interview questions ● A Confidentiality Agreement for translators should I require their assistance in interviews My thesis supervisor, Professor TL Cowan, first reviewed my entire draft REB worksheet package and, after approving, sent it to the ADR. Pursuant to Faculty policies, the ADR and RFC spent roughly 10 business days to provide valuable insight and suggestions so that my application may pass the university’s official REB process and adhere to Faculty standards. I made the necessary changes in consultation with my supervisor and both the ADR and RFC approved it fairly quickly. Considering all the approvals so far, I reasonably assumed that the official REB process would also be as straightforward.

Professor Cowan created a REB Human Research Protocol application on the University of Toronto’s REB website for me and I used my Faculty-approved draft application to fill out the official REB protocol. To my surprise, the official REB application had extra questions that did not exist on the draft REB worksheet. These extra questions exist to encourage the researcher to be more granular when explaining certain aspects of the research. For example, the REB Human Research Protocol worksheet simply has the following question under the section titled “Participants and Data”:

Describe the participants to be recruited, or the individuals about whom personally identifiable information will be collected. List the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Where the research involves extraction or collection of personally identifiable information, please describe where the information will be obtained, what it will include, and how permission to access said information is being sought.

However, the official REB application asks for more than just the above:

Is there any group or individual-level vulnerability related to the research that needs to be mitigated (for example, difficulties understanding informed consent, history of exploitation by researchers, power differential between the researcher and the potential participant)?

Because these extra questions had not been in the draft REB worksheet that I had rigorously worked on with Professor Cowan, the ADR and the RFC, I spent a couple of days thinking critically about the structure of my research in consultation with my thesis supervisor.

Furthermore, the online REB application also required an extra document to add to my application: a set text that will be used to communicate with participants by email. I would not have been able to submit my application without revealing the exact wording I would use to initially contact my participants and the medium that I would rely on. As my intended participants were largely my friends or acquaintances, I had planned to contact them how I normally communicated with them: either through social media or mobile messaging applications (i.e. WhatsApp, Messenger, etc). Before the official REB process, it had not made sense to me to use email to communicate with them because it could be jarring or strange to them coming from me. I am accessible to them through instant communication technologies compared to a seemingly more formal medium such as email which they probably only use at work, school or in business interactions. Essentially, I was worried that using a communication method that my friends and acquaintances were not used to could potentially formalize my relationship with my participants. Despite initial concerns, I saw the merit of using email to ensure my communication was consistent as well as appropriately recorded.

After completing the online REB Human Research protocol application, Professor Cowan and the ADR approved my submission. It was finally sent by the ADR to the REB in mid-October 2018. I could not conduct any research in the field until I received approval and, as a result, I focused on writing sections of my thesis that did not involve human interaction as well as tending to my other MI courses. As I was told REB reviews take varying amounts of time, I did not know what to expect and hoped for a quick response.

My REB protocol application was reviewed and returned back to me in late November 2018. The application was reviewed by a single person on the board because the human interaction risk was low. Generally, it seemed like the reviewer had a difficult time understanding the scope of my

thesis, especially the terminology and emergent methods that I was hoping to employ. There were a large number of revisions the reviewer needed before they could approve it. After reading their comments, I realized that I may have complicated the REB application by including my entire thesis project plan and structure. Instead, the reviewer only wanted to know the part of my research that involved the human interaction. They did not need to know all about the social science, emergent methodology that I aimed to employ in the entire thesis; their concern lay with the methods and actions that would take place with my human participants. Furthermore, while it was quickly approved by Faculty of Information professors such as my thesis supervisor and ADR, I should not have assumed that the reviewer would also understand research methodology used and taught by the Faculty of Information. In any case, as I was eager and anxious to start my work in the field, I made drastic revisions to my REB application in consultation with my thesis supervisor to meet the REB’s standards.

2.2.1 A story left untold

One major change I had to make was in regards to my interview questions. I had intended to use a storytelling method when interacting with my participants as opposed to oral history because it allowed for more organic responses and less rigid or structured communication with participants. In her 2015 article, Robina Qwul’sih’yah’maht Thomas explores storytelling as a method in ethnographic research throughout her career as an academic and indigenous woman. She explains the importance of storytelling in indigenous communities as a means of imparting knowledge and history and further illustrates how the oral traditions of indigenous peoples have never been seen as legitimate in a Western European written world. The article differentiates between the two qualitative methods of data collection: oral history interviews and storytelling. The author continues by revealing her experience using storytelling, as opposed to oral history interviews, as her primary method of data collection for her master’s thesis on the lives of indigenous people in the Kuper Island Indian Industrial School, a residential school in BC. According to Thomas, oral history interviews are structured by the researcher as they focus on asking questions about topics that they specifically want to learn about. On the other hand, storytelling is about approaching the conversation without any presuppositions or planned questions and letting the researcher “hear what the storytellers wanted to share” (Thomas 2015, 245). She says that, other than her initial meeting with her participants, the rest of the study was

led by the participants, including the duration, time and place of the “interviews.” By remaining largely silent and providing a casual environment to her participants, the author was able to gain their trust and respect and, eventually, they began to call her to arrange more “interviews” in order to reveal more and more stories.

For my participant-driven research project, I had intended to use this storytelling method as my primary data collection method and came up with only two overarching questions for the participants:

1. What are the stories you want Canadians to know about your experience in Canada? 2. What are your thoughts on the current representation of the Afghan diaspora in Canada? The aim was to study what emerged organically, without interrogation, from these general questions and let the emerging themes inform the creation of a proof-of-concept digital archives/exhibition (see Chapter 3) by especially taking into account their comments on the Afghan-Canadian experience, representation and identity. As Thomas explained, the main point is to allow the participants to control their interaction with being researched and to gain agency in a scene that is often structured for the benefit of the researcher(s).

The REB reviewer asked me to add more questions and did not seem convinced of the effectiveness of storytelling over oral history. This was fair, in a sense, because storytelling is an emergent method and not a conventional social science method. For this reason, it is understandable that the REB would prefer traditional methodology that has proven to be low risk and that they are familiar with. Nevertheless, the switch to oral history interview methodology as my primary data collection method was a major shift and meant that I needed to considerably change my research actions. In order to stay as true to my original method as possible, I decided to conduct semi-structured oral history interviews and be slightly more direct in my questioning. This meant that instead of only two questions, I developed six more and edited the original ones as well. The questions now pointedly focus on bringing to light the archival needs of the participants as well as their digital habits:

1. What are your settlement4 experiences in Canada? 2. What kinds of information resources were available to you at that time? Did you use online resources? 3. Are there any online communities that you connect to currently? 4. Do you look online to learn about the experiences of other Afghan-Canadians? 5. Would an online archive of Afghan-Canadian materials be appealing? 6. What, if anything, are the materials you would like to see from other Afghan- Canadians? 7. What, if anything, do you want the Afghan-Canadian community to know about your settlement experiences in Canada? 8. What, if anything, do you want the public, all Canadians, to know about your settlement experiences? The original first question (“What are the stories you want Canadians to know about your experience in Canada?”) was divided up into questions number 7 and 8 above to differentiate between Afghan-Canadians and non-Afghan-Canadians. Finally, I concluded that I would receive my answer to the second original question (“What are your thoughts on the current representation of the Afghan diaspora in Canada?”) throughout their answers to the new questions. As is obvious from the above list, the participants would now be faced directly with questions about their digital habits and needs for the creation of a digital archive or digital exhibition for the Afghan-Canadian community as opposed to letting their life stories indirectly inform the proof-of-concept. In hindsight, and this will be discussed later in this chapter, the new, more direct questions provided lower risk than two open-ended questions because now the REB had a better understanding of the direction the conversation would go and could see that it was, ultimately, harmless. Furthermore, storytelling methodology and emergent methods - discussed later in this chapter - probably seemed too complicated to the REB for a master’s thesis in contrast to oral history.

Once my REB Human Research Protocols application package was edited and I simplified my research process, I re-submitted the application for further review, also taking into further

4 For Afghans born in Canada, I would say “life experiences” instead. They would not have settled in Canada, unlike like their parents or older siblings who would have been born in a different country.

comments from my thesis supervisor. Overall, the revisions I had to make did not drastically change my ultimate research goal which was, essentially, to conduct a critical ethnography of the long-time settled Afghan-Canadian community (10 or more years in Canada) to understand how they engage with their hyphenated identity and media representation and to assess their digital archival needs to attempt to begin the process of talking back to the negative stereotypes placed on to the community as a whole. Although I would have preferred certain methods over others, I was satisfied that I could still work towards my original goal even with the changes I was forced to make.

After two weeks, at the end of November 2018, my REB application was approved and I could finally begin my work in the field.

2.3 Methods: Critical Ethnography

Considering my research goal, my thesis research project is an ethnographic study of a specific intersection of the Afghan diaspora in Canada: the long-time settled Afghan-Canadians who were born in Canada or had lived in Canada for 10 or more years. As a result, I have chosen to follow a critical ethnographic framework to guide my research. According to D. Soyini Madison (2012) in Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, critical ethnography can be defined as “the ‘doing’ - or, better, the performance - of critical theory” (p. 14). Critical ethnography is not afraid of being political: one of its main responsibilities is to acknowledge practices of “unfairness and injustice” (Madison 2012, 6) in a specific lived experience. The critical ethnographer is essentially an activist as they “take us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control” (Madison 2012, 5). As a result, the critical ethnographer creates space and a platform for the stories and voices of silenced and marginalized identities by using their own privileges, skills, and networks as a researcher.

Critical ethnography is also reflexive. By this, I mean that a critical ethnographer is always considering their own positionality during the research process - “turning inward” - and constantly acknowledging their “power, privilege, and biases just as we [critical ethnographers] are denouncing the power structures that surround our subjects” (Madison 2012, 8). It is

important to recognize and make transparent one’s own influences on the research in order to “take ethical responsibility for our own subjectivity and political perspective, resisting the trap of gratuitous, self-centeredness or of presenting an interpretation as though it has no “self,” as though it is not accountable for its consequences and effects” (Madison 2012, 9). Understanding one’s positionality in the research and one’s modes of belonging in relation to our thought processes, feelings, views, and “orientation of our bodies, gestures, and musculatures” (Madison 2012, 16) serves to keep the critical ethnographer accountable to their research actions and decisions. In my research, I have practiced this aspect of critical ethnography by laying out my entire research process in this thesis, especially by including my justifications for methodological decisions. My reflexivity process will become more apparent later in this chapter.

Madison also stresses that the critical ethnographer must be cognizant of the fact that they are not just acknowledging subjectivity in their research when they consider their ethnographic positionality but their “subjectivity in relation to others” (Madison 2012, 10), in this case, in relation to the research participants. One must always be aware of one’s existence with regard to the people around us and their own identities. In the context of research, Madison suggests that dialogue - or “dialogical performance” - can be a prime means of presenting ethnographic research in a way that pays respect to the liveliness, timelessness, and ever-changing elements of the interaction between the researcher and the participants (Madison 2012, 10-11). The aim is not to present the lived experiences of a community in a fixed moment in time - “the ethnographic present” - but to allow dialogue, a very humble and human mode of communication, to express the vivacity of the participants’ “voices, bodies, histories, and yearnings” - the ethnographic presence (Madison 2012, 11). In the context of my research, this presents itself in my choice to conduct oral history interviews over any other type of data collection method (i.e. surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, and so on).

Finally, a core aspect of critical ethnography is the use of theory as the primary method of data interpretation or analysis. As Madison explains, the exact theory used is beside the point. Nevertheless, it is crucial to understand that “theory, when used as a mode of interpretation, is a method, yet it can be distinguished from a method (and indeed take a backseat to method) when a set of concrete actions grounded by a specific scene are required to complete a task” (Madison 2012, 15). Theory is used to interpret the research data and, subsequently, illuminate the

processes and power involved in the findings that are often silent or hidden. For the critical ethnographer, this often includes outing unfair power structures and injustice entrenched in the marginalized community’s existence. In the context of my own research, I use grounded theory as a method of coding my data which I go over in the section titled “Coding: Grounded Theory.” As will be evident later in this chapter, my research also employs different theories to analyze or make sense of the categories and themes that emerge from the data.

2.4 Methods: Improvisation Theory

In the past, and arguably still today, ethnographic or anthropological research was birthed in structures of power that were/are deeply colonial. Kimberly Christen reminds us that “[a]rchives are physical reminders of colonial practices that once promoted the exclusion of minority and subaltern voices” (Christen 2018, 403) because they were usually the storage places of colonial anthropological research. Anthropologists documented profusely and destructively with very little consultation or collaboration with the researched group. Speaking in the context of Indigenous voices, Christen explains that, even with the digital tools available to us today, digital curation of archival materials “include academic research practices that have not been historically open to subaltern voices, and popular trends in digital curation do not suggest an ethical commitment to maintaining the integrity of collections or providing the familial or community-based links to and narratives of these items” (Christen 2018, 405). Despite Christen revealing a handful of key projects that are conducting participatory practices with Indigenous communities (Christen 2018, 406-410), academic research practices have generally followed settler ideas of knowledge-making which have, naturally, made their way into our archives - digital or otherwise - today. These practices were often created for the benefit of the researcher(s), catering to their traditional scientific and anthropological methods, and did not take into account the knowledge-making practices of the researched group. They did not - and often still do not - bend to the needs and wishes of the participants, solidifying the power of the researcher over the participant.

With this in mind, I had no intention of continuing the historically colonial practices of anthropological or ethnographic research and, thus, Professor Cowan and I devised a strategy to

create a participant-driven and collaborative research project using critical ethnography and improvisation: the antithesis of traditional research practices.

The best way to illustrate the mechanics of my interactions with my participants in this research is to apply improvisation theory to explain my approach. Although a theory from the field of performance studies, improvisational performance or curation can be a useful analogy in most participatory and participant-driven research. It focuses on handing the power of the curation - or in this case, the research process - to the performers/participants in order to observe how they engage with the scenario when given minimal direction. Traditional research practices often never gave the reigns of the research process to participants. As will be apparent, I argue that my participant-driven research process can be seen as improvisational curation.

In “Play Fair: Feminist Tools for Teaching Improv” (2007), Amy Sehan describes improvisation as being at the center of “the very process of creation, and the product (or performance) is ephemeral and unrepeatable” (p. 136). In the context of participant-driven research, this points to the need for consultation before even entering the “field” because of the unrepeatable nature of participant interaction. Although the scientific method stresses the importance of repeatable outcomes, it is a grave mistake to assume that ethnographic research conducted on a sample pool of participants should represent the entire community/group; such widespread assumptions harken back to colonial practices that led to stereotypes, racism, and discrimination. The sample pool of participants are a small community within a larger scene and their specific identities cannot be repeated to create the same outcome (or product) as the original research. The historical, environmental, social, and political factors that created the life, mind, and behaviour of a single potential participant is impossible to repeat and makes that individual unique. With that in mind, it is clear that one must be cautious when bracketing their population during ethnographic research.

D. Soyini Madison explains that code-switching or “world travelling” is an important aspect of critical ethnography. According to the critical ethnographic method, “travelling” into a different world than one’s own means to enter “a tiny portion of a particular society” (Madison 2012, 118) and learn “the different rules and norms in those Other worlds” (Madison 2012, 119). The critical ethnographer essentially needs to understand the cultural protocols of their research population including “knowing the language, the aesthetics and taste, the norms of civility, and

the emotional landscape” (Madison 2012, 119). As a critical ethnographer, I had to be reflexive and understand my own identities and biases; the result of this process was my realization that I could not possibly know all the cultural protocols in the Afghan diaspora. Despite being a member of the Afghan diaspora in Canada, I recognized that Afghans have greatly diverse identities which meant that my own experiences as a Farsi-speaking, Sunni Muslim, immigrant Afghan woman (to name just a few intersections) could not make me the authority to speak for and understand the entire Afghan-Canadian diaspora. As a result, my strategy was to create an advisory team of community members that could inform me of cultural protocols and advise on my approach into the Afghan-Canadian community for participants. Nevertheless, as an Afghan woman that is engaged in the Afghan-Canadian community, I had easy access to the community at the center of my research both for the creation of my advisory team and to find participants.

2.5 Assembling the Advisory Team

Most of the studies on Afghan-Canadians that I mentioned in my literature review chapter focus on the settlement practices of the Afghan diaspora in Canada, their experiences integrating into Canadian society in the first few years of arrival, the immediate effects of a new culture and language on different generations, and the ways in which Canadian social service agencies are failing these newcomers. To find participants, many of the studies (Khanlou, Koh and Mill 2008; Quirke 2011; Nourpanah 2014; Dossa 2008; Stack and Iwasaki 2009) relied on settlement agencies that probably only had contact with the most recent Afghan refugees and immigrants or specifically targeted those that had lived in Canada for less than 10 years, thus excluding any Afghan-Canadians that have long since left the care and services of an agency or, perhaps, never utilized a settlement agency in the first place. As mentioned in my literature review chapter, most studies on the Afghan diaspora in Canada also usually have Farsi-speaking participants or they do not find it relevant to reveal the spoken language of their Afghan participants. The lack of acknowledgment for the multiple identities of the participants is dangerous because the studies could easily create sweeping claims about the entire Afghan representation in Canada when, in fact, their conclusions only represent the particular group of participants in each respective study. Transparency is important to lay out in ethnographic research so that readers can understand the contexts surrounding the findings.

As a result, I decided that both my advisory team and participants would consist of Afghan diaspora members that have lived in Canada for 10 or more years in order to encompass a demographic of the Afghan diaspora often not represented in studies. I also decided that the advisory team members and participants should be as ethnically, regionally and/or linguistically diverse as possible which meant that the team members needed to be comfortable publicly stating those aspects of their identity. This decision was made to showcase the incredible ethnic, linguistic, religious, sexual, and regional diversity of the Afghan people and to make it clear that the study would be able to accommodate English, Farsi, and Pashto speakers alike. I also decided that it would be important to acquire a mix of participants and advisory team members that were born in Canada and others that had immigrated over 10 years ago in order to get a range of perspectives. On another note, the advisory team members were not required to introduce me to potential participants in order to advise me but the goal was to implement a snowballing strategy after choosing diverse advisory team members. The advisory team could channel their networks to find potential participants if they desired or they could be participants themselves.

For the scope of this Master’s thesis, I knew I would not be able to include the wide breadth of intersections within the Afghan diaspora in Canada. I would need to focus on conducting a smaller scale study that could potentially inform a much broader, rigorous, and in-depth study in the future. For this reason, I chose advisory team members amongst my Afghan friends and acquaintances as I knew it would be quicker than to put out a public call. This also meant that my advisory team members and participants would be in their 20’s, close to my own age. In accordance with my REB reviewer’s requirements, because I was drawing participants from among my friends and acquaintances, I needed to be sure that they did not feel pressured into being a part of my research because of our pre-existing relationship. They should not feel as though their refusal to be a part of my research would reflect badly on our future personal relationship. Although this requirement was technically for my participant recruitment process only, I decided to extend this concept to my advisory team recruitment as well. To reduce such pressures, I sent offers to be a part of my advisory team to each individual by email only once and did not include a date that they must respond by. I did not pressure them further as the point was to allow the potential advisory team members to have as much time as possible to think about whether they were interested or not.

I sent six offers in early December 2018 and all six individuals eventually responded with initial interest. Some responses were faster than others. Nevertheless, I responded to each initial email as they came in. The next email I sent to each interested individual included the Advisory Team Information Letter and Consent Form which they were instructed to read through carefully. If they agreed to the form and wished to be a part of the advisory team, they had a few options: 1) they could meet with me separately if they have further questions and sign a hard copy; 2) they could print, sign, scan, and return the consent form back to me electronically; 3) they could sign a hard copy of the consent form at the first advisory team meeting and 4) finally, they could suggest any other option if the stated options did not work for them. Five of the potential advisory team members contacted wanted to be a part of the advisory team and sign the consent form at an initial advisory team meeting. The sixth individual decided, after reading through the information letter and consent form, that they could not commit to being a part of the advisory team because of personal commitments. My advisory team would consist of five team members, all in their 20’s with varying Afghan ethnic backgrounds, lifetimes in Canada (all over 10 years), and linguistic capabilities (primary Afghan languages: Farsi and Pashto).

I contacted each of the five interested advisory team members individually through email to find out their availability for the month of December and early January in order to hold an initial advisory team meeting. Within two weeks, now mid-December 2018 and nearing the holidays, everyone finally responded and I concluded from their availabilities that it would not be possible to have everyone in one room. Unfortunately, I was forced to separate the team into two groups based purely on when everyone was available: 3 met with me on January 10, 2019 and 2 met with me on January 13, 2019. As stated in their consent form, I also provided them with a meal at my expense for attending an advisory team meeting.

My plan was to meet with each team for at least an hour at a central location and discuss their thoughts and opinions on my research project, especially in the context of my approach into the field. As they were not participants, our meetings were informal but I took notes during each meeting focusing especially when any advisory team member brought up a specific cultural protocol or opinion they had.

Following both meetings, one crucial piece of advice was stressed repeatedly to me: I should not try to recruit the elders - our parents’ generation or older - in the diaspora for the scope of this

thesis project. They emphasized that the elders’ lack of digital literacy would be a barrier to ethically acquiring their archival materials, photographs, stories, oral histories or performances for a digital archive. Their concern lay in the fact that some elders in the community may not fully grasp the legal issues - such as copyright and ownership - or societal risks involved when sharing their stories, regardless of medium, onto a public digital archive compared to the curated and controlled environments of private social media accounts such as Facebook or Instagram. The advisory team also wondered if the elders would understand what a digital archive was and its potential. They essentially urged that the elder generations should be educated in all the digital risks, benefits, legal issues, and purposes of a digital archive in their preferred language. Despite attempting to relieve their concerns by explaining that the participants will all receive all the necessary information in their chosen language to inform them of my thesis project, the advisory team was adamant that the elders would need much more time and patience before they could be fully informed participants. Furthermore, the advisory team believed that, because of their unfamiliarity with digital archives and digital cultural heritage, the elder generations may not even be comfortable sharing anything with the digital archives if they do not see their children or young people contribute first. The concern here was that they did not think that the elders would even know how to begin to engage with such a platform and that they may not trust something new to them if their children do not engage with it first. I realized that I did not have the means, especially the time, to develop a digital literacy education workshop in three different languages (i.e. English, Farsi, and Pashto) catered to elders for the scope of this 1-year Master’s thesis project. Although my proof-of-concept digital archives would be semi-private, I did not feel that it was ethical to, even then, acquire their oral history and possible accompanying archival material for it. As a result of these points, I decided that I would not recruit elders as participants for my thesis.

2.6 Setting the Stage: The Participants

Finally, after the first meetings with my advisory team, a few of them introduced me to potential participants and one of them decided to be a participant themself. I identified one potential participant myself through my own network of family and friends while the rest of them were in some way connected to me by my advisory team. There were 6 in total and I was acquainted with them all before the start of this thesis. After receiving their contact information, I sent

emails to each potential participant using the REB-approved email text to gauge their interest and, as I did with my advisory team, did not email them further after the first time. Again, this strategy was to make sure that the participants did not feel pressured to accept the offer because of our pre-existing relationship.

As a participant-driven research project, I allowed my participants to mostly improvise their engagement (or performance) with my research. This methodological decision is a prime example of improvisation theory in action. Amy Sehan explains that improvisational performance is never “pure spontaneity” (2007, 140 emphasis in original) because “[i]t is created within a set of goals and guidelines” (2007, 139). As Sehan highlights, one of my goals was to observe how a marginalized community engaged with research when the researcher- participant power dynamic was shifted. Although I wanted to limit the amount of guidance they received from me, through improvisation theory, I understood that I had to give them some direction in order to receive an organic, improvised performance or engagement with my research.

My six potential participants took their time responding to my offer of participation and I did not send them further emails aside from the first one. As anticipated, using email, a method of communication that my participants would not expect from me, seemed to formalize my previous friendship-relationship with them. Their email responses were often formal and they took a lot of time to respond. This formalization of relationship seemed to impede on my research progress because some participants would ask questions about my email on social media platforms - where they were used to communicating with me - and then, after their questions were answered, they would respond to my more formal email. Oftentimes, participants opted to just respond to my emails through social media platforms and did not bother to respond by email at all. It certainly seemed like they rejected the formalization of our relationship. It is also important to note that the formalization probably contributed to some pressure to perform a more sophisticated or formal version of themselves as they sought to reciprocate my own forced, formal performance on the email platform. The formalization has potential to dissuade participants because the research project begins to take on an air of sophistication and academism that participants may feel pressure to reciprocate. Unfortunately, it also creates a

power dynamic - between the “academic, formal” researcher as powerful versus the “lesser” participant - that I was hoping to mitigate.

Once I finally received a response from all six, now nearing the end of January 2019, I sent them the Participant Information Letter and Consent Form to read over and, similar to the advisory team, if they agreed to be a participant, gave them the freedom of choosing how they wanted to sign the form. All of them chose to meet with me in person to sign the consent form and ask questions about their role as a participant. Some chose to arrange meetings through email and others took the conversation off of email to contact me through social media instead. Before the actual, initial meeting, I sent each participant the list of questions that I would be asking them in the oral history sessions so that they had an idea of what the oral history interview would be about. I met with them wherever they were comfortable for the first meeting, some choosing to meet at the University of Toronto campus and others at their homes. The participants asked me questions at the initial meetings and I attempted to clarify their confusion. Once they signed the consent form and agreed to be a participant, we negotiated their in-kind compensation which would involve me using my skills, connections, and privilege for their benefit in some way. Crucial in critical ethnography is the concept of reciprocity and remuneration. In favour of participants receiving equal remuneration for their invaluable contribution to research, Madison explains that “[r]esearchers may not be able to predict the consequences of the material assistance to the study population” (Madison 2012, 131, emphasis in original). Giving them the power to choose their own compensation according to what they need means that I, as the researcher, am not imposing my own bias and assumptions into the research and, again, transferring power to the community. I did provide them with examples of in-kind compensation so that they had an idea of my skills, networks, and privileges. For example, they could choose to have a dinner paid at my expense, that I edit a couple of their academic papers, that I use my graphic design skills for their future event/initiative, or that I use my access to a professional camera for a photoshoot. Following this, I discussed with each participant whether they wanted to be anonymous for the study or not. Three of the six participants decided to use their real names; the other three have pseudonyms and also selected to alter their voices for the oral history recording.

In the end, each of my participants come from varying ethnic groups: Tajik, Pashtun, Uzbek, and Hazara. Most of them consider Farsi their main Afghan language; only two of them were Pashto- speaking. Four of them identified as male and two as female. All had lived in Canada for more than 10 years and a few were born in Canada. Each could also trace their family heritage to different parts of Afghanistan: Kabul province, Ghazni, Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Takhar province. Again, as mentioned previously, they were all in their 20’s.

Following the signing of the consent form and the initial meeting, all six participants also desired to do the oral history interview on the same day as the initial meeting instead of a different time and date. I understood that they had busy lives and more important commitments in comparison to a research study so I complied with their requests. Thankfully, I had prepared for such a situation and had all the necessary equipment ready with me: my laptop, a Yeti Microphone that I borrowed from my Faculty’s library, and a Sony Voice Recorder that I also borrowed from my Faculty’s library as a backup to the Yeti. Each participant consented to being recorded.

Before each interview, I asked them if they thought they only needed one or two questions from me in order to gauge whether they had their words planned in advance or if they preferred I go through each question methodically so they had some guidance. All of them decided that they preferred that I ask them each question one-by-one. Only one participant wanted to see if they were comfortable with just one question but when I asked that first question, they realized that they could not continue without the guidance of multiple interview questions.

Each participant was also given the choice of providing accompanying materials (i.e. photographs, poetry, videos, fiction, etc) to enhance their digital representation on the proof-of- concept digital archives. Although a few expressed an interest in providing photographs or written works, ultimately none of them sent me anything to accompany their oral histories. This outcome, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, allowed me to engage with the concept of an audio and text-only based digital archive in my design process.

2.7 Grounded Theory: Memoing & Coding:

I used grounded theory as my primary method of memoing, coding and analyzing my research data. Although a theory, when used as a method, grounded theory is considered an emergent method in the social science field.

Emergent methods grew largely out of the need for new research methodology that could accommodate the growing field of interdisciplinary research. According to Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Levy in Handbook of emergent methods (2008), the changing social world helped to grow the field of interdisciplinary research and promoted the idea of multiple, diverse and subjective perspectives that seek “to question and thus expose the power dynamics of traditional paradigms by illuminating previously subjugated knowledge” (p. 7). Influenced by social justice movements, emergent methods strive to uncover previously-silenced knowledge as a result of traditional methods. Technological advancement increasingly motivated the scholarly community to reconsider traditional research methods.

As an emergent method, grounded theory revolves mainly around two concepts that are also important in critical ethnography: reflexivity and consultation with participants. In her chapter “Grounded theory as an Emergent Method” in Handbook of emergent methods, Kathy Charmaz (2008) attempts to provide evidence that the grounded theory method is a type of emergent method. Grounded theory is based on the concept of reflexivity, putting aside any preconceptions when undertaking research, “using simultaneous data collection and analysis to inform each other” (Charmaz 2008, 155), and employing abductive reasoning. Furthermore, much like critical ethnography, grounded theory is constructivist and encourages the researcher to critically assess their positionality at all stages of the research process. Reflexivity in grounded theory also encourages the researcher to critically assess their positionality at all stages of the research process, which is essentially linked to the idea of transparency of the researcher as repeatedly emphasized by D. Soyini Madison.

During each interview, I took short notes and memos as discreetly as possible on my laptop where I had an OneDrive Word document open for each participant, making sure to maintain focus and eye contact with each participant as much as possible. For the first participant, I decided to jot down in a notebook but, finding this inefficient, the rest of the notes and memoing

for the other participants was done on my laptop. According to Charmaz, “Memo writing is about capturing ideas in process and in progress...Memos can be partial, tentative, and exploratory. The acts of writing and storing memos provide a framework for exploring, checking, and developing ideas” (2008, 166). Throughout the research process, I wrote down dozens of memos. After each interview, I would also take some time to reflect, analyze the memos I wrote down during the interview, and write a short reflection on that interview. This allowed me to organize my thoughts and begin initial development of ideas.

Once the interviews were finished, I spent all of February 2019 transcribing each interview. All together, the interview transcriptions equaled 63 pages, single-spaced. I sent each transcription and corresponding oral history audio file via email to each the respective participant once I was finished transcribing and asked them to edit the transcription as they saw fit. Again, the aim here was to ease their pressures with the research. As I noted earlier in this chapter, having to communicate through email had somewhat formalized my relationship with some of the participants and I wanted to make sure that their engagement with research was not alienating or uncomfortable. Furthermore, as well as being in-line with critical ethnographic and grounded theory methods, it was important for me to give the participants the power to control their representations in this research. In the end, most participants chose to edit the Microsoft Word document with their transcription on their own and emailed them back to me after varying lengths of time. Only two participants met up with me so that we may edit the transcription together in real-time. The transcriptions were returned to me mostly in the month of March 2019 however, the last one was returned to me in April 2019, which was quite close to the internal deadline for my first thesis draft. Because I received the last one so late in my thesis progress, I made progress on other aspects of this thesis because I could not analyze and code the transcriptions until they were all in. I began the coding process in mid April 2019.

Because grounded theory emphasizes continuous collection and analysis of data, it concentrates on creating theoretical categories after coding “rather than focusing solely on the results of inquiry” (Charmaz 2008, 156). There are two types of coding involved: initial coding and focused coding. Charmaz explains that “[i]nitial or open coding requires a close reading and interrogation of the data” (2008, 163) while focused coding “allows them to sort and synthesize large amounts of data, thereby expediting their work” (2008, 164). Focused codes are then tested

“against the data by using them to examine large batches of data” (Charmaz 2008, 164) until the researcher decides which ones will become theoretical categories. Grounded theory also includes a coding procedure called theoretical sampling where the researcher obtains data, creates theoretical categories from analysis of the data, and then goes back into the field to test if their analysis and categories are correct. Through meeting with my advisory team, I was able to discuss, test, and work out theoretical categories that I first came up with.

Instead of using software such as NVivo to analyze my data, I decided to code them all myself as I was only dealing with six interviews. All of the initial coding was done line-by-line using gerunds as opposed to the regular method of scouring data for themes and topics. According to Charmaz, “[c]oding with gerunds, that is, noun forms of verbs, such as revealing, defining, feeling, or wanting, helps to define what is happening in a fragment of data or a description of an incident” (Charmaz 2008, 164 emphasis in original). As a result, I made dozens of codes as I went through each line of each interview transcript. Not every line of text rendered a code but many certainly did.

Once I had a list of initial codes, I continued my analysis by also looking through my memos for ideas that were brought up frequently. It was valuable to be able to look at the ideas that emerged from my memos during the interviews and early research process and then be able to compare them with the codes that were emerging from the interviews. This allowed me to narrow my focus on initial codes that were similar to each other and create tentative themes or categories that emerged from the interviews. In order to test whether my tentative categories had some merit, I met with my advisory team. In my second meeting with them, one team member was not able to be present but, nevertheless, I met with the rest. They were able to advise that one of my tentative categories may not apply to my data. I brought up assimilation theory as a possible theoretical category and they suggested that it did not seem to fit well with the memos and, as a result, I returned to my categories and realized that a better emergent category or theme would be the Canadian concept of immigrant integration.

After consulting with my advisory team, I chose three theoretical categories or concepts that emerged from the interviews. These three are symbolic annihilation, archival pedagogy, and assimilation/integration. As will be more obvious in the next section (Findings), most of my participants identified issues that they found with the Afghan diaspora community in Canada and

further focused on how the digital archives could possibly intervene as a solution to those problems.

2.8 Findings

2.8.1 Symbolic Annihilation

One of the most prevalent purposes for the digital archives that emerged from the interviews was its use as a platform for traditionally-silenced intersections or “alternative” voices within the Afghan-Canadian scene itself to unite the community. In other words, they suggested that one of the audiences of the digital archives should be Afghan-Canadians so that they may see and listen to the lived experiences of Afghan-Canadians from all walks of life in order to normalize the various identities of the Afghan diaspora in Canada for the Afghan-Canadian community. The participants cited divisions in the Afghan-Canadian community and advocated for unity in the diaspora, revealing different barriers to this unity: the pressures of being the “perfect Afghan” and, relatedly, the marginalization of minority identities by the majority.

A few participants mentioned how there are pressures to fit a specific “Afghan mould” or to adhere to certain identity expectations to be the quintessential Afghan. Many of the participants did not mention where or how this one “perfect Afghan” identity was created but, when asked, George explained in his oral history interview that a lot of the behaviours and expectations placed on Afghans in Canada are set by the community itself:

“Um... so... it’s sort of unspoken in the Afghan culture. Just these rules and these behavioural guidelines. And, everyone really knows, like you know what’s expected of you, you know what you’re expected not to do...” (George, Oral history interview with author, January 17, 2019)

He further admits that if an Afghan-Canadian does not follow or strive to reach the “perfect Afghan” identity, they are automatically viewed as a bad person and given a negative image. For example, George believes that being a devout Muslim is one criteria for achieving the quintessential Afghan identity in Canada but if one strays from Islam, the Afghan community would shun them. He shares a personal anecdote on this topic:

“Um, grew up Muslim, went to mosque, - all of that - learned how to read the Qur’an but like just personally as an adult I’ve sort of strayed from that. Doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a terrible person but, as far as the Afghan community goes, that is what the assumption is.” (George, Oral history interview with author, January 17, 2019)

Adding to George’s sentiments, Palwasha Zerghune believes that Afghans perpetuate negative generalizations about each other based on regional or ethnic identities and, as a result, further the divide between the diverse identities:

“Every part of Afghanistan is different and I feel like Afghans themselves are making these images for select places, like geographic places in Afghanistan. I feel like they just do it themselves, to be honest.” (Palwasha Zerghune, Oral history interview with author, February 10, 2019)

Building on George and Palwasha’s observations, Frishta Bastan acknowledges that unity within the Afghan diaspora in Canada is difficult to envision because of the historical mistreatment of certain minorities, such as the Hazara people, both in Afghanistan proper. As an individual that identifies as a Hazara ethnic minority in Canada as well as an Afghan-Canadian, she discloses that some Hazaras in Canada have turned their backs on the Afghan identity and have focused on strong community-building for a Hazara-Canadian scene only:

“So, like, being Hazara, obviously, I can- I can preach unity all I want and want to - and truly genuinely want it but, at the same time, you’ll run into a lot of Hazaras who don’t even want to identify as Afghan. They identify as Hazara-Canadian. And, they won’t … You know, for them, for them being identified as Afghan is a political term.” (Frishta Bastan, Oral history interview with author, January 27, 2019)

It is obvious that, for some Hazaras in Canada, they felt continued mistreatment or prejudice from the rest of the Afghan diaspora in Canada and resorted to building a community centered on their Hazara ethnic identity, echoing what Palwasha was alleging about similar prejudice from Afghanistan moving with the diaspora to Canada.

As mentioned earlier, the participants did not outright reveal a single cause or perpetrator of the singular, model Afghan identity but possibilities were certainly mentioned. Palwasha also hypothesizes that it is the older generation of Afghans in Canada - often the immigrant parents of

today’s Afghan youth - that are a factor in the lack of unity because of regional/ethnic prejudices that they brought over from Afghanistan to Canada:

“But like – I feel like the younger generation is just, like, thriving for their... not thriving but, like, wanting a community. We want, like, we want that union but, like, can we get it without this – not pressure – but, like, build-up from the past. And this build-up from our older generations where they have so much influence over us. But there’s a lot of young people, you know, that are like “I’m not talking to a Pashtun5 because he’s a Pashtun and my dad told me not to talk to Pashtuns.” You know, there’s so many people that come across that.” (Palwasha Zerghune, Oral history interview with author, February 10, 2019)

Similarly, Oybek Makhasher hints that the immigrant Afghan parents’ generation in Canada expect certain career choices out of their Afghan children:

“Okay, so, typically if you’re from Middle East or Asia you’ve been told to be a doctor, professor, a lawyer... one of white-collar jobs. That was never my interest.” (Oybek Makhasher, Oral history interview with author, January 31, 2019)

Here, Oybek is alluding to Afghan parental pressures for Afghan diaspora youth in Canada to pursue certain careers. He further reveals later in the interview the effect these pressures to conform can have on diaspora children:

“[F]or the parents, if your kid, child, is interested in something – whether it’s career-wise or a hobby – obviously as long as it’s not bad, don’t discourage it because they will take it away later on and think ‘Oh, maybe I should have done this.’ ‘Cause you never know, maybe, if you discourage something... In this community, it’s common, from what I’ve seen. Especially, the more fresher immigrants, they are more discouraging than people who have been here a long time. A kid will take it away, if they’ve been discouraged something earlier in life, and they will always remember it. Whether they say it, won’t say it, doesn’t matter. Let the kid, the child, at least have a taste of something different so they can decide on their own. Right? Um, don’t stuff the culture down their throats too

5 “Pashtun” refers to the Pashtun ethnic group, one of many ethnic groups in Afghanistan.

much. Occasional is fine, but don’t stuff it because, who knows, maybe they’ll get sick of it.” (Oybek Makhasher, Oral history interview with author, January 31, 2019)

As we can see, according to him, parents consider the model Afghan in Canada to have careers in law or medicine. He remarks that an Afghan diaspora child of immigrants can feel like the “culture” - in this case, this most likely refers to cultural expectations - is being forced onto them. While he uses the word “culture,” we can see that cultural expectations are just a facet of the model Afghan identity: among other expectations, the perfect Afghan also adheres to cultural expectations placed on them.

According to my participants, these pressures to conform to a single, ideal identity can be soothed when young Afghan diaspora members are able to learn about other Afghan-Canadians with similar lived experiences as them outside of the model Afghan identity. In a sense, they identified the digital archives as a mental health tool: if one is able to see that others are facing the same struggles as oneself, it may contribute to healing.

I suggest then that if the different intersections of the Afghan diaspora in Canada are maintaining negative stereotypes about each other and praising certain lived experiences over others (i.e. becoming a doctor or being a devout Muslim and so on), the majority are also subconsciously creating an identity for the ideal and model Afghan at the same time. An idea emerging from my participants, this singular, quintessential Afghan identity is the goal that everyone strives to reach, rendering any other identities or lifestyles invalid, ignored and/or eradicated in mainstream society. In other words, the identities of Afghan diaspora members that do not conform or strive to conform to the singular, ideal identity created by the majority of the Afghan community in Canada - quite possibly, by the elder generation - are facing symbolic annihilation. Their so-called “inappropriate” identities are wiped from community discussions and media to discourage the diaspora from being anything else than the ideal.

First coined by the late George Gerbner, a scholar and professor of Communications, the term “symbolic annihilation” was eventually co-opted in the 1970s by feminist media scholars to refer to the inadequate representation and near silence of powerful female figures in mainstream television, both fictional and non-fictional. Gaye Tuchman’s introductory chapter titled “Introduction: The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media” in Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media (1978) identifies the different female roles that are

consistently shown on television programs and noticed that “for commercial reasons (building audiences to sell to advertisers) network television engages in the symbolic annihilation of women” (Tuchman 1978, 14).

More recently, Michelle Caswell, a leading archival theorist, has applied the symbolic annihilation concept to archival studies. In “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives” (2016), she explains the application of symbolic annihilation in archives the best: “how members of marginalized communities feel regarding the absence or misrepresentation of their communities in archival collection policies, in descriptive tools, and/or in collections themselves” (Caswell, Cifor & Ramirez, 2016, 59). Her article “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation” (2014b) focuses specifically on the creation of the South Asian American Digital Archives (SAADA) as a tool to combat symbolic annihilation of the South Asian American community, in mainstream archival collections (Caswell 2014b, 27). Caswell explains that with a population of almost 3.5 million, it was “astounding” that “only a few museums ever had organized exhibitions on South Asian Americans and no archival repository was systematically collecting materials related to South Asian American history. None even had South Asian American history as a collecting priority” (Caswell 2014b, 27). As a result of the South Asian American community feeling silenced and not represented - symbolically annihilated - in America’s history and archival collections, Caswell and Samip Mallick both co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archives. In other words, a marginalized community’s identity(ies) can be symbolically annihilated as a result of the dominant culture’s power, privilege and subsequently stronger voice.

Generally, symbolic annihilation has largely centered on a dominant culture maintaining and preserving its own identity and priorities in all forms of media at the detriment of a marginalized community. Through my research participants, I observed their issues with the ideal, model Afghan identity as the symbolic annihilation of the marginalized, supposedly inappropriate and diverse identities within the Afghan-Canadian community. In this context, I propose that symbolic animation is being perpetuated by the dominant, majority Afghan-Canadians as they validate and praise the ideal Afghan identity and belittle all other Afghan identities. As seen above, at least two of my participants identified the dominant group within the Afghan-Canadian

community to be the elder generation. The deliberate symbolic annihilation of minority Afghan identities and alternative or “inappropriate” lifestyles by the majority produces an ideal, model Afghan identity that is then forced onto the rest of the Afghan-Canadian community to strive for. Obviously, this is why my participants felt that the community was not united: if everyone is pressured to be something they are not, they will naturally avoid the Afghan-Canadian community for fear of the negative consequences of not attaining - or performing - the ideal Afghan identity. Although symbolic annihilation is usually a function of dominant culture through the silencing of minority voices, I propose here that it can also apply to a dominant- subordinate cultural power dynamic within one single identity-based community if one considers intersectionality. As a result, a digital archives could essentially provide a platform for the forcefully-silenced Afghan identities and, ultimately, combat the symbolic annihilation of those identities at the same time.

2.8.2 Community Archiving & Archival Pedagogy

Many of my participants identified the digital archives as a crucial pedagogical resource that could allow Afghan-Canadians to learn more about themselves and to teach future generations about the present-day Afghan diaspora all on one platform. In contrast, some regarded social media as a means to discover and keep up with the stories of Afghan diaspora members in the present as opposed to being used for the education of the future generations.

Yet another issue in the Afghan diaspora that emerged from my interviews with the participants was the lack of cultural and historical knowledge of the Afghan part of their hyphenated Afghan- Canadian identity and the desire to learn more. For example, Palwasha revealed the tedious process of scouring YouTube for current videos of different types of attan (a traditional, Afghan dance) and ethnically-diverse weddings, expressing the need to have them all in one place both for the education of the present generation:

“So – oh my God, if you could just sit down and watch different types of attan and learn from it, like, I would love that! Or weddings. Like, there’s so many different traditions, I feel like, in Afghanistan itself that, like, it would be so cool. Rather than searching through YouTube and coming across, like, 2009 videos, I’d rather the updated ones.

Yeah! I think that would be awesome.” (Palwasha Zerghune, Oral history interview with author, February 10, 2019)

Similarly, Oybek divulged that he thought the digital archive should also include a history of the diaspora and explain the historical context of the creation of the Afghan diaspora so that future generations may understand the struggles as well. Essentially, he is advocating for a space to provide a political history of the modern state of Afghanistan:

“Maybe...an actual history, if it was able to be traced, from Afghanistan, in Afghanistan? You know what I mean?...So like, the history of that region to date. Of why people are now leaving that region to a better life.” (Oybek Makhasher, Oral history interview with author, January 31, 2019)

Frishta also suggests an educational use for future generations, visualizing that the stories of present Afghan diaspora members will be useful for Afghans in the future:

“So, that’s what I’m saying, because I would want to see that, that’s what I would want to do is that I would be so keen to put in my poetry in there. Maybe a couple family photos and like um uh stuff like maybe written like in grad school. Like that kind of stuff. Just to give future generations an idea of the experience 1st gen. Afghans had. Yeah, who knows? Maybe the 7th or 8th gen. kids would look at this, you know?” (Frishta Bastan, Oral history interview with author, January 27, 2019)

Rumi talked about the benefits of including long-form conversations with Afghans - similar to podcasts - in the digital archives so that different, often-silenced intersections of Afghans can see and hear themselves existing within the community. He believes that this can allow Afghan diaspora members whose identities are usually suppressed to embrace themselves:

“But I think something like this, an interview, is also important. A voice – a conversation with another Afghan is also important because they can just listen to it and... just listen to it and see if they share any similarities with someone. Because all the walls, all the bullshit, is pushed aside and what it is, is two people simply speaking to each other and one person sharing how they feel, right? How they see the world, right? And, if they see the world from this point of view that can help. If another person listens to that online and they’re like ‘Oh, let me see what this guy is trying to say’ and they listen to it and then

they’re like ‘Oh this guy sees the world this way, and this person sees the world this way!’ Well these are not... They’re all saying like that Afghans are not backward- thinking and like you know it’s, you know, they’re saying that there are other Afghans out there. Just like any other community, good and bad exists within the people and stuff like that. I feel like it can open up the avenue for more Afghans to embrace who they are, embrace their identity, embrace their uniqueness, right?” (Rumi, Oral history interview with author, January 26, 2019)

He focuses on the importance of the Afghan diaspora learning about themselves for their own mental wellbeing and mindfulness - if a diaspora member can see that they are not alone, they benefit from a sense of unity and community.

Zal struggled with envisioning what he would want to see on the digital archives for much of the interview. He admits that he is less interested in stories of the Afghan diaspora today because he has easy access to those materials through social media:

“And then here, it’s like, we’re talking about the Afghan-Canadian experience ... Would that necessarily mean that the photos are, you know, people last week hanging out, having a good time? Bunch of Afghan-Canadians? I guess, maybe that would be interesting for people in the future...but to me it would be like, I could just open my Instagram. Stuff like that.” (Zal, Oral history interview with author, February 4, 2019)

Nevertheless, aside from some curiosity for learning about how Afghans in the diaspora navigate their hyphenated identities, even he admitted that his interest lies in educational uses for the digital archives through historical photographs with short captions and materials about different Afghan languages.

Generally, archival pedagogy refers to and focuses on the teaching of archival theory and practice to archival students in a classroom. Canadian archival theorists frequently inform archival education today but rarely acknowledge issues of identity-based representation (i.e. racial or ethnic identities) and, as a result, it is largely absent in official archival pedagogy. The participants of this research, Afghan-Canadians that have lived in Canada for 10 or more years, identified the need for a pedagogical resource for their own diaspora community on one platform and were not satisfied with social media as a platform for documenting their experience wholly.

They have recognized a disparity in their own knowledge of the Afghan diaspora in Canada and, seeing nothing out there in their school curricula, determined that they needed a means to archive themselves for themselves in the present and for future generations in the form of a digital community archive.

2.8.2.1 How to create a community pedagogical resource In order to understand how a digital community archives can become an essential pedagogical resource for the community it serves, we must first shift our understanding of an archives from an extractive resource to an ethnographic subject. In her brilliant article “Colonial archives and the arts of governance” (2002), Ann Laura Stoler uses a case study of Dutch East Indies archival documents to demonstrate how archives were used as powerful tools for colonial state authority, formation and ethnography in the past and that anthropologists perpetuate these notions today by treating archives as extractive resources instead of ethnographic ones. Stoler stresses that conceptualizing the archives as a place for knowledge retrieval does not allow researchers and students to be critical of the contexts of the archival materials they engage with (Stoler 2002, 90). Instead of knowledge retrieval, she explains that archives are entities of knowledge production: “[I]t signals a more sustained engagement with those archives as cultural artifacts of fact production, of taxonomies in the making, and of disparate notions of what made up colonial authority” (Stoler 2002, 91).

Once we make this conceptual shift from archives-as-source to archives-as-subject or from knowledge retrieval to knowledge production, Stoler believes that it is clear that we must envision the archives as an ethnographic subject. Typically, ethnographic subjects, such as the participants of my thesis, provide knowledge or information/data for a social science researcher through some sort of data collection method (i.e. interviews, questionnaires, and so on) as the researcher(s) attempt to understand an aspect of the subject population or ethnographic community that they are studying. When the archives become an ethnographic subject, Stoler explains that it provides this “data” of its archival power when we understand its silences and “read for its regularities, for its logic of recall, for its densities and distributions, for its consistencies of misinformation, omission, and mistake - along the archival grain” (Stoler 2002, 100 emphasis in original).

However, how do we read “along the archival grain” if the archive is a blank canvas and does not exist yet? In their article “A Critical Archival Pedagogy: The Lesbian Herstory Archives and a Course in Radical Lesbian Thought” (2016), Carden et al. also engage with the benefits of this conceptual shift to archives-as-ethnographic-subject as they explore a critical archival pedagogy that developed during an undergraduate course, Radical Lesbian Thought. The authors employ Stoler’s concepts in their work and, as a result, crucially point out that “archives are defined not only by what they contain, but also by their dynamic processes of meaning making” (Carden et al. 2016, 27). This is a critical concept that can inform the creation of the digital archives for the Afghan-Canadian community because it allows for the diaspora to engage in those “processes of meaning making” by contributing to the archives. As an ethnographic subject, the digital archives for my community in its current state is a blank canvas and is not able to provide “data” about the community it represents. However, as the Afghan-Canadian community makes decisions and contributes stories, artifacts, and lived experiences to the digital archives, they are also engaging in the meaning making of the community’s representation and identity(ies). The digital archives as an ethnographic subject becomes an organic entity because it continuously exists as the ever-shifting platform that presents the lived experiences and various identities of the Afghan-Canadian community. The community creates meanings for the digital archives and it, in turn, is finally able to “provide community data” as an ethnographic subject.

As the Afghan-Canadian community engages with meaning-making for itself through the digital archives, the community is simultaneously learning about itself and its intersectionality. Because individual community members contribute what they deem important about themselves in a format of their choosing to the digital archives, they are collectively teaching each other about their individual identities and lived experiences. Instead of a non-community member or resource teaching the community about themselves, the community reveals its multiple identities organically by individual digital contributions. This is how the Afghan-Canadian digital archives becomes a pedagogical resource for the community it was created to serve. The organic nature of an archives is a traditional archival principle that can be traced back to early archival theorists Hilary Jenkinson and Theodore R. Schellenberg, both proponents of archives that naturally or organically arise from activities (Tschan 2002, 177 & 179). The benefit of conceptualizing the digital archives as an ethnographic subject is that it allows for the pedagogical resource - the presentation of the stories, identities, lived experiences, and representations of the Afghan

diaspora in Canada - to constantly change as the community itself changes and the digital archives becomes an organic entity.

2.8.2.2 Community Archiving as a solution Designated as community archiving, grassroots organizations that have identified a gap in mainstream archival institutions attempt to create an identity-based archives centered on the commonality of their identity. Identity-based community archiving as a method and practice is almost seen as separate from traditional archival pedagogy when, in fact, it should be at the forefront of archival classrooms, especially considering the increased diversity and multiculturalism in Canada. How will a newly-trained, Canadian archival studies graduate deal with very Canadian issues of race and ethnicity in their profession if it is not readily discussed in their educational curriculum? Canadian archival pedagogy rarely ever concerns itself with the exchange of knowledge from critical race theory to the archival classroom, squandering the chance for improved archival praxis.

Without discussions of diversity in the archival classroom, archival studies graduates enter the profession without the tools to address issues of diversity and inclusion at mainstream institutions that are already helpless in matters of race, ethnicity and diversity. Thus, a cycle perpetuates and mainstream institutions are continuously ill-equipped to think about these issues. When concepts of diversity, ethnicity and race are not at the center of archival decision-making (i.e. acquisition of diverse community records and so on) at major archival institutions, grassroots community archival initiatives based on ethnicity or race are born.

The lack of discussion on race, ethnicity, and diversity in the contexts of diaspora communities may not be happening in archival classrooms in Canada but they are certainly being addressed among archival scholars and studies in the UK and the United States. In their 2017 article “Migrating memories: transdisciplinary pedagogical approaches to teaching about diasporic memory, identity and human rights in archival studies,” Anne Gilliland and Hariz Halilovitch discuss the creation, pedagogical methods, and findings of a new course at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Information Studies that explored diaspora memory and identity in archival studies. Gilliland and Halilovich admit to the difficulty of archival documentation of the lived experiences of a migrant group or diaspora member because they move between different locations, are not always able to keep their records as they flee, and are

often afraid of persecution if they reveal any documentation that proves to be fake (Gilliland & Halilovich 2017, 82). The authors reveal that archival pedagogy has not been able to teach archival students on these issues in the past until they created their own course at UCLA, Migrating Memories: Diaspora, Archives and Human Rights. The article identifies the importance of diaspora communities in being able to document their lived experiences and explain that the impact is priceless for identity formation:

“At the same time, especially over the longer term, memories and documentation of forced diaspora, both tangible and intangible, can play instrumental roles in identity formation in all the locations involved. They can be instrumental in individual and community recovery, trans-generational transfer of experiences and understandings of events, and the impulses to commemorate, document or forget” (Gilliland & Halilovich 2017, 81).

Despite praising government initiatives in archiving the immigrant experience in UK, Australia, New Zealand and the USA (Gilliland & Halilovich 2017, 81), Gilliland and Halilovich also maintain that mainstream archival institutions and community archives have, so far, not been completely successful in documenting the diaspora experience (Gililand & Halilovich 2017, 82).

In Caswell, Cifor and Ramirez’s 2016 article, they assess the impact of community archives on the identity-base community it serves, specifically focusing on the South Asian American community’s reaction to seeing themselves existing in the history and knowledge-making of the South Asian American Digital Archives (SAADA). Similar to Gilliland & Halilovitch’s argument, the South Asian community members in the article saw great value in SAADA and its work in the community’s identity formation. The authors also explain that the term “community archives” is generally used to denote any archival initiative that is not in some way connected to a mainstream institution such as a university, government or corporate archives:

Community archives can range from entirely independent, permanent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations dedicated solely to archival endeavors; to archival projects within larger community organizations; to informal, loosely defined, temporary configurations of community members dedicated to shaping the collective memory of a community’s past. As such, the term ‘community archives’ can be seen as being imposed externally by

archival studies scholars rather than emerging organically from within such community efforts. (Caswell, Cifor & Ramirez 2016, 62)

They admit that archival studies scholars have largely dominated archival pedagogy and, when faced with archival practices that they were unfamiliar with or that did not conform to tradition, designate the initiative as a community archives. In the chapter titled “Community Archives” of Currents of Archival Thinking, Rebecka Sheffield (2017) also admits that the term community archives usually denotes initiatives that are outside of “formal heritage networks” and further explains that “the upsurge in independent community archives has produced tensions among heritage professionals largely trained in European traditions concerned with the intellectual, legal and, physical control of records in formal archival networks” (Sheffield 2017, 352).

However, as these independent, community-based archival organizations bear the brunt of the labour to respectfully, ethically, and responsibly document the gaps they see in mainstream archival institutions, they receive far less financial support or legitimacy than the mainstream archives. Caswell et al. (2016) reveal that the federal government in the United States certainly do not provide comparable funding for such important archival labour in contrast to the supportive government of the United Kingdom (Caswell, Cifor & Ramirez 2016, 64). For their part, my Afghan-Canadian participants clearly recognize that they have a right to knowledge and a digital archives could be the community’s pedagogical resource to learn about themselves but they may not receive much support from established archival theory, methods or funding.

2.8.3 Assimilation/Integration

While the first two categories/themes that emerged from my data focused on the use of the digital archives for an Afghan-Canadian audience, although not glaring at first, a majority of the participants also proposed that the digital archives should have non-Afghan-Canadians in mind as well. As a secondary audience, the participants agree that, through the digital archives, non- Afghan-Canadians may then discover the supposedly successful assimilation/integration of the Afghan diaspora into Canadian society.

When asked about what they would want a non-Afghan-Canadian audience to know about their lived experiences in Canada, whether they were born in Canada or not, participants usually referred to the media portrayal of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in the United States and

the continued war in Afghanistan as another culprit for the negative image of the Afghan diaspora in the perceptions of non-Afghan-Canadians and even Afghan-Canadians themselves. On that note, as a reminder, the participants established above that the Afghan diaspora has a negative image of its intersections because of prejudices brought over from Afghanistan to Canada - possibly by immigrant elders - that contributed to the symbolic annihilation of minority Afghan identities by the majority Afghan diaspora population. Here, I am suggesting that the participants also blame the media portrayal of the 9/11 terrorist attack and the war in Afghanistan as another determinant for the negative perception of their own Afghan diasporic identity. However, the damage-centred media portrayal of Afghans would not only affect Afghans born in Canada or having lived in Canada for 10 or more years, it would also profoundly affect the perceptions of the non-Afghan-Canadians. As a result of this portrayal, it is no wonder that my participants generally favoured the digital archives to become a platform to perform and illustrate how Afghans in Canada have “successfully” assimilated into Canadian society, a form of talking-back to stereotypical narratives and “reassuring” them that Afghans in Canada are “normal” Canadian taxpayers.

Frishta explains that the 9/11 terrorist attack caused a drastic shift in the perceived identity of the Afghan-Canadian by Canadian society that also personally affected her. She adds that the discrimination and negative image of the attack caused Afghans to be “discouraged away” from their Afghan identities:

“I think if you asked this question when I was 8-9 years old when the whole 9/11 thing happened and then the idea of being Afghan shifted drastically for, I think, a lot of people my age. A lot of people that time was way too young to have experienced the stuff that we experienced in terms of discrimination and stereotypes that were coming out. So... The strange thing is that, although I knew it was happening around me, it never discouraged me away from my Afghan identity. I know that it did discourage a lot of other people. Um but because of... It’s interesting. What I would want people to understand is when you have a set perception of people and you um encourage this kind of negative behaviour, it really affects people. And we were like really young. We were like 8-9 years old.” (Frishta Basta, Oral history interview with author, January 27, 2019)

She reveals that an identity was created for Afghan-Canadians, a marginalized group, by the majority Canadian culture based on the media portrayal of Afghanistan during a time when young Afghan-Canadians were trying to understand and balance their hyphenated identities. She herself did not know how to wrestle with a label suddenly placed on her identity by outside forces at a young age:

“Even though, I mean, even though the politics around the event was not necessarily, um, targeted towards Afghans but the war was a result of it so that completely just, you know... It made no difference to people. So, people just associated you with that. Um, so I think that experience is interesting because when that happened you’re kind of... I think that was the tipping point for a lot of people including myself, you know? Like, ‘Okay, what does this even mean? All these people know about who I am but I don’t even know who I am.’ So, that’s what I would want people to understand.” (Frishta Bastan, Oral history interview with author, January 27, 2019)

Rumi stressed that his initial perception of the Afghan diaspora in Canada was largely shaped by the media portrayal of Afghans and Afghanistan:

“I came to Canada and I started adapting to the environment around me which was about learning the language, you know partaking in – it's about learning the language and culturally assimilating with the people around me so initially I was not really that fond of the Afghan community that I had come to know. Even though three of my best friends are Afghan, I didn’t really have a fond memory of the Afghan community or the Afghan people because I had a childish idea of what it meant to be Afghan – what, what Afghans represented. I believed that... unfortunately, as most people are, I was provided a negative image of Afghanistan, Afghan people, through the media and the bad people that existed within the community...” (Rumi, Oral history interview with author, January 26, 2019)

He further suggests that the skewed and biased media portrayal of Afghans instilled in non- Afghan-Canadians affected him because, as he interacted with them, they reinforced the one- sided representation that he was seeing and hearing by the media but in real life. As a result, he believed the portrayal and tried to acculturate:

“I just had a negative image of who I was and, ergo, I wanted to be more like the people that were widely accepted within the Canadian community in which I thought it was... you had to be more Canadian” (Rumi, Oral history interview with author, January 26, 2019)

Although he revealed that exposure to more Afghan-Canadians in university, specifically through the Afghan Student Association at his campus, assisted with his shift in perception, in our interview, he still tended to focus on how he and many other Afghan-Canadians were “normal” and living “everyday” lives like everyone else:

“When it comes to settlement, I don’t think people have had a negative experience with Canada. I’m not going to overly generalize and say all people. I don’t know.” (Rumi, Oral history interview with author, January 26, 2019)

Aside from attempting to reassure me that most Afghan-Canadians have succeeded in assimilating to the dominant Canadian culture, he also repeatedly brought up the biological equality of all humans, ultimately emphasizing that the Afghan diaspora members are the same as any other Canadians. In his own words:

“Regardless of our colour, creed, ideas, notions, views of world... we’re all human beings, right? We’re all human beings at the end of the day. We all bleed. We all fear. We all love. We all hope. We all wish better for ourselves. We all wish better for our families. We all wish better for the world. And I don’t think anybody out there likes pain. I don’t think anybody out there embraces, you know... embraces just feeling bad and feeling divided. I feel like we all want love. We want prosperity for ourselves, for our kids, for everyone around us. And, we’re all human beings at the end of the day.” (Rumi, Oral history interview with author, January 26, 2019)

George, echoing Rumi’s sentiments, also tries to highlight that there are similarities between Afghan-Canadians and non-Afghan-Canadians, however, he points out that the existence of differences between the two cultures should not be viewed as negative:

“Having grown up here – born and raised – having the same sort of pop culture surrounding me all through my life as my several-generations-back Canadian friends, that there’s - so there’s those similarities in the upbringing. We went to the same schools and

all of that but then there’s also this difference and I think this difference really enriches connections between people.” (George, Oral history interview with author, January 17, 2019)

Growing up in Canada, Palwasha remembers that, as young children, her parents tried to abate or at least slow down their children’s assimilation into the dominant Canadian culture by controlling their dress in public spaces (i.e. events, concerts, visiting relatives, and so on). She recalls how she yearned to dress “Western” like every other Afghan at the events she attended:

“Um, growing up in Canada, there was always I guess a fear from our parents that... You know, they didn’t want us to become too Western so there was also – there was that feeling, whether I was going to events and depending on what we wore or who we associated with at events, even if it was Afghan events, it was usually like ‘Okay, go get your kalay-e Afghani!6’ and you know ‘Let’s go!’ And, I remember growing up as a child, we would always be like ‘Mom! Dad! We don’t wanna wear Afghan clothes!’ Like, ‘Why do we have to constantly wear Afghan clothes?’ Um, and we’d always look at everyone else wearing dresses and skirts and stuff and we were like, ‘Why not? Why can’t we wear that?’ (Palwasha Zerghune, Oral history interview with author, February 10, 2019)

Only Zal questioned whether the digital archives should even be considered for a Western, settler-Canadian audience. First and foremost, he was adamant that the digital archives should be for the Afghan-Canadian community and raised concerns over curating the platform for anyone else. When asked about who he thought the audience of the digital archives should be, he responded with the following:

“When it comes to myself, I don’t really know right now but... But, it’s kinda weird ‘cause, in one sense, I’m like ‘The general Canadian public - what do they need to know or what should they know?’ I feel like my answer to that is going to be the most generic. Like, ‘Show people that we’re just humans and, you know, regular people who, you know, just speak a different language and eat different food and, you know maybe, worship differently or something like that.’ You know? But, then that’s - I feel like I’m

6 “Afghan clothes”

talking about something that’s...catered for a white, Western palate which is... Is that really worth your time, you know? I don’t know if it is.” (Zal, Oral history interview with author, February 4, 2019)

Possibly unbeknownst to themselves, most of my participants shared an aspiration for the archives to display their “Canadian-ness” to a non-Afghan-Canadian audience, specifically concerned with erasing doubts of their assimilation into Canadian society. Following damage- centred, skewed media portrayals of Afghans and Afghanistan as well as the 9/11 terrorist attack, Afghans were forced to think about their hyphenated identities. Who were they going to be now that the general Canadian society saw them as the media portrayed them? This media portrayal seemed to have “discouraged” - as Frishta puts it - some Afghans in Canada from their Afghan identity and also further shaped the negative, dividing views the Afghan diaspora had for each other. With both prejudices passed down and brought over from Afghanistan and damage- centred, Canadian narratives of the Afghan diaspora clouding their perceptions, it is no wonder that many in the Afghan-Canadian diaspora wanted to “be more like the people that were widely accepted within the Canadian community” as Rumi explains in our interview. By considering a potential audience of Western, settler-Canadians in the design of the digital archives, some of the participants seemed to believe that the digital archives could be a tool for the Afghan diaspora to gain acceptance in the eyes of the rest of Canadian society, especially in light of increasing Islamophobia and racial tensions in Canada. If they could perform their supposedly successful assimilation into Canadian society for the dominant, settler-Canadian audience on the digital archives, a platform that is familiar to the dominant culture, perhaps the Afghan diaspora in Canada could talk back to damage-centred, stereotypical, and discriminatory narratives.

Expounding the entire literature on assimilation theory is not the purpose of this paper but I will briefly engage with a few topics. Definitions of assimilation theory have changed throughout time according to the different waves of migration to the West, especially the United States. In the 1920s, it was defined by Robert E. Park and E.W. Burgess as “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life” (Park & Burgess 1969, 735). In their article “Rethinking Assimilation Theory For A New Era of Immigration” (1997), Richard Alba and Victor Nee argue that this

definition fails to account for the reduction of ethnic culture and language, instead focusing on “the social processes that bring ethnic minorities into the mainstream of American life” (Alba & Nee 1997, 828). The authors explain in their 2003 book Remaking the American Mainstream that older definitions of assimilation as a theory and concept tended to be ethnocentrist, assuming that the Protestant White middle-class identity was the desirable American norm. Alba and Lee also describe previous assimilation theories arguing that assimilation was inevitable and too uni- directional, always expecting the minority ethnic group to assimilate to the dominant culture. As a result of all these previous theories failing to address the most current wave of immigration and migration, Alba and Nee suggest a new definition of assimilation: “the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences” (Alba & Nee 2003, 11).

More pertinent to immigration in Canada is the Canadian focus on integration instead of assimilation. According to Peter S. Li in his 2003 article "Deconstructing Canada’s discourse of immigrant integration," immigrant integration in Canada has been framed by a government- supported policy of multiculturalism and diversity (Li 2003, 318). He further defines integration:

“The term implies a desirable outcome as newcomers become members of the receiving society, by which the success and failure of immigrants can be gauged and by which the efficacy of the immigration policy can be determined. In reality the assessment is often based on a narrow understanding and a rigid expectation that treat integration solely in terms of the degree to which immigrants converge to the average performance of native- born Canadians and their normative and behavioural standards” (Li 2003, 316).

Li explains that the government officially supported a multiculturalism policy that encourages “a version of cultural difference that poses no possible threat to universalism and cohesion of liberal democratic society” (Li 2003, 317). Despite this, however, critics of multiculturalism stress that it weakens national unity and seems to support only private or individual multiculturalism instead of also extending it to institutional and/or ideological Canadian structures (Li 2003, 317).

The important aspect to note in both assimilation and integration is the fact that the “receiving society” in both the United States and Canada express a desire for immigrants to assimilate or integrate into their society to some extent, with Canada supposedly unwilling to amend institutional structures according to Li. Both societies create policies, services, theories, and research on “successful” assimilation and integration into their dominant cultures. Such apparent

support for integration and assimilation is obviously felt and understood by immigrants as well. The majority of my participants, for example, believe that “proving” their integration into Canada, especially their “Canadian-ness,” through the digital archives should be one of the goals of the digital archives in the hope that they fulfill the government’s desire for their integration. Essentially, they have concluded that the realities of their lived experiences in Canada could be affirmed and realized by the mainstream society if the Afghan-Canadian community can reassure the government of its integration.

2.9 Finishing Up

Following the analysis process, as promised, I sent this chapter in May 2019 to the participants so that they may see how their oral history interviews were incorporated into the thesis. Following my critical ethnographic methodology of participant-driven research, they had the authority to make suggestions, edit or remove any mention of their name/pseudonym, opinion and/or oral history transcription snippet in the thesis. Because I had little time left to finish the writing of this thesis, I informed each participant that they could send me their changes by a certain date (May 31, 2019). After that date, I would assume that they approved the chapter. The participants never responded with any suggested changes. At the same time, I sent them invitations to privately access the proof-of-concept digital archives that I created so that they may see the research results and view their representation on the digital archives. Again, I was open to comments and suggestions about the website. The proof-of-concept digital archives website will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

2.10 Chapter Summary

This chapter illustrated my research process, including the rationale for many of my methodological decisions, and presented the findings that emerged from my interviews. By explaining my interaction with the university’s Research Ethics Board and providing a detailed account of my interview procedures and data analysis method, I was able to transparently demonstrate how my research methodology changed and how that impacted my entire thesis project. The interviews revealed three key concerns of the long-time settled Afghan-Canadian community that greatly inform how this community sees itself and the creation of a digital

archives for this identity-based community. First, the participants divulged the existence of a model, ideal Afghan identity perpetuated by the authoritative, dominant intersection of the Afghan community. While this leads to the symbolic annihilation of all other identities within the larger community, participants identified the need for this problem to be mended through the creation of an inclusive digital archives for the community. Secondly, the participants admitted to a lack of educational resources and knowledge of the Afghan diaspora in Canada and emphasized the potential for the digital archives to be a community-created, organic, and emergent pedagogical resource for community. Finally, the interviews showed that my participants also believed that the community’s perception of them by non-Afghan-Canadians is largely still based on the media’s damage-centred portrayal of Afghans and the war on Afghanistan. They want to show how “successfully” they have integrated into Canadian society and, thus, hope that the digital archives can change the stereotyped perception, allowing them to gain acceptance in mainstream Canadian society. The following chapter will detail the design process of the proof-of-concept digital archives and how the oral history interviews informed its creation.

CHAPTER 3: DIGITAL DESIGN

I am more petal than thorn,

more bandaid than blade,

even if I have a tongue

that can rival a sword.

– Nazaneen Kaliwal, Untitled

3.1 Chapter Overview

This chapter will illustrate the digital design process of the proof-of-concept digital archives, The Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives (ACDA)7, by explaining the methodology used followed by a description of the current private website. I provide rationale for many of the design decisions made on the digital archives’ website and include features that should be included in the future, all informed by data collected from the research participants.

3.2 Digital Archive Rationale

It is important to include here why I chose to create a digital archives over an analogue, physical archives. First of all, as a grassroots community initiative, this archives does not have access to a physical facility that could house analogue archival materials nor does it have the funding to inquire after such a space. Secondly, the archives could be far more accessible to Canadians as a digital archives instead of a purely analogue one. Finally, I anticipate that it would be difficult to permanently acquire materials from the Afghan diaspora as most of them fled to Canada with very little of their possessions on their person. They may not be willing to part with the few things they have of their homeland which is why it would be easier to simply digitize their materials and return it to them (more on this below).

7 ACDA: http://www.acdarchives.wordpress.com

3.3 Speculative Computing

As computer technologies advanced throughout time, many scholars in the humanities began to apply formal, rational computational logic and thinking to human behaviour and thought in order to uncover new ways of thinking, subsequently paving the way for the digital humanities discipline. According to Johanna Drucker in SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (2009), imagining the human brain as a computer and blurring the lines “between thoughts and processing” or behaviours and programs became popular ideas to the general populace with the advent of advanced computer technologies (Drucker 2009, 2). Digital humanists, however, were far more interested “in the intellectual power of information structures and processes” (Drucker 2009, 2). They decided to explore the idea of linking “the formal logic of computational processes to the representation of human expressions (in visual as well as textual form)” (Drucker 2009, 3). These concepts became the basis of digital humanities,

On the other hand, Drucker explains that speculative computing is a response to the objective, computational way of thinking touted by the digital humanities field because it promotes “subjective and probabilistic concepts of knowledge as experience (partial, situated, and subjective)” (Drucker 2009, 3). Because objectivity is so highly regarded in computational logic and thinking, anything that is subjective does not bear comparable weight; however, digital cultural representation should rely on human interpretation - making it subjective - and, as a result, should apply speculative computing.

The concept of speculative computing adheres to a number of principles and methods that must be decoded and deduced separately in order to attain any glimmer of mastery on the topic. In her book, Drucker repeatedly urges restraint from labelling speculative computing as a concept in opposition to digital humanities but, nevertheless, structures her definition of it by comparing it to tenets commonly attributed to digital humanities. Although somewhat counterintuitive to her original concern, it is useful to make such comparisons in order to compute the newer, radical methodology, especially since understanding what it is not provides a much clearer image of what it is. The rest of this section will be dedicated to parsing the fundamental principles of speculative computing according to Johanna Drucker and how they relate to this thesis project.

While digital humanities relies on highly objective information technology processes that utilize standardization and normalization of digital artefacts (i.e. text, photographs, videos, poetry, and so on), speculative computing employs a ‘pataphysical approach. ‘Pataphysics encourages subjectivity by studying the exceptions to the norms and averages created using objective statistical methods - “the outliers often excluded” (Drucker 2009, 26). As errors and deviations are few and far between, ‘pataphysics calls for pointed, subjective analysis without preconceived notions whereas the digital humanities discipline would use quantitative methods to make assumptions about the digital artefact based on digital precedence and without much individual evaluation.

The next principle, briefly mentioned in the previous section, is the use of quantitative methods in digital humanities that are often based on statistical, mathematical and/or computational problem-solving methods for solutions and, as a result, creating objective assumptions about digital artefacts or works. It focuses on rigorously and methodically uncovering, revealing and/or discovering what was once not known. On the other hand, a speculative computing model emphasizes intervention “grounded in a quantum concept of a work as a ﬁeld of potentiality” (Drucker 2009, 26) where any performance of the digital work (i.e. reading, viewing, and so on) is considered an intervention. This concept suggests that the digital artefact cannot possibly be static or fixed as every interpretation of it is an act of intervention, warping it into a new object or work each time.

Drawing from the previous principle, the notion of self-identicality - the idea that an entity is strictly equal to oneself/itself - is a common practice in digital humanities. Oftentimes, digital artefacts are only considered authentic if they remain exactly the same throughout their entire digital existence. The digital artefact loses its integrity when anything causes a byte of change or amendment. Furthermore, digital humanistic traditions posit that “every text is made as an act of reading and interpretation” (Drucker 2009, 27) which suggests that a digital artefact only has agency when it is created with a pre-planned destiny of performance such as an act of reading or interpretation. A speculative computing approach would rely on codependent emergence: the idea that a digital artefact’s agency and existence is reborn or iterated after every reading/interpretation/viewing carried out by the reader/viewer. The programming or contexts of the reader/viewer breathes new life into a digital artefact every time so that the digital artefact’s

identity and meaning are fluid - the relationship of the subject and object is, thus, codependent. Drucker calls this quantum intervention. She explains that quantum “intervention determines the text. The act of reading calls a text (speciﬁc, situated, unique) into being” (Drucker 2009, 27).

3.3.1 Speculative Computing in My Research

Quantum intervention determines a different truth or existence of a digital text each time it is viewed because of the programming of the reader/viewer and can also be applied to digital archival artefacts. In the framework of the proof-of-concept digital archives website, this concept supports supplying rigorous context and thick description as a form of quantum intervention in a digital artefact’s presentation, meaning or existence. By providing rigorous contexts, I recognize also that the digital archival artefacts on ACDA cannot be objective because its existence - or the way it will be perceived/read - will be iterated differently each time it is viewed and entirely dependent on the viewer/reader’s contexts. It could never be objective, which is in opposition to traditional archival practices that attempt to describe archival materials and present them in an as objective way as possible so as to remove any bias of the archivist. Rigorous context on a digital archive can look like transparency concerning the creation of the digital artefact, its custodianship history, and the inclusion of the creator’s voice in addition to traditional archival descriptive elements. My decision and advocacy for thick description and rigorous context is influenced by the brilliant work of the Local Contexts initiative and the Mukurtu CMS project. An initiative created to aid Indigenous, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Native peoples with controlling and managing their cultural heritage and intellectual property, Local Contexts developed Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels that provide additional context to digital artefacts, often complementing the traditional, standardized descriptive elements. These TK Labels have been used most often on Indigenous archival projects that run on Mukurtu CMS. Mukurtu is an “open source platform flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse communities who want to manage and share their digital cultural heritage in their own way, on their own terms” (About - Mukurtu CMS, n.d.) and was first created for the needs of the Warumungu Indigenous community.

Because the digital artefact cannot be wholly objective, presenting rigorous, surrounding contexts of a digital artefact lets the viewer/reader judge, make their own conclusions, and, subsequently, give meaning to a digital artefact that will be largely subjective and unique to that

viewer/reader. Context will continuously be added as the ACDA receives more information and as visitors/researchers interact with the digital artefacts.

In line with speculative computing methodology, the proof-of-concept digital archives website was created cognizant of codependent relationships with the Afghan-Canadian diaspora members. The digital archives was not created until after consultation with the community: it is ‘pataphysical because no preconceived notions were made about its design. This decision was made to avoid forcing the community’s representation, stories, and lived experiences into a template or structure that may not accurately reflect their knowledge-making practices. As a result, the website itself follows an iterative design strategy and recognizes that it is fluid: it will consistently change (and grow) as more relationships with more community members are created. The digital archives, as an organic entity, depends on the contributions of the Afghan diaspora members in Canada and, in turn, Afghan-Canadians depend on its iterative, dynamic nature to accurately document their lived experiences as their own identities change and grow.

The principles of speculative computing support an iterative digital design strategy that I ultimately used in the creation of the proof-of-concept digital archives for this thesis project. Iterative design involves consistent prototyping, testing and analysis of a product; in this case, the proof-of-concept website. After initial creation, some of my advisory team members and participants weighed in with their thoughts on the design of the website which would inform any changes. It is important to note that the current state of the digital archives’ website is not complete and has only been inspired by my six participants; for a truly community-informed digital archives design, I would need to conduct a much more comprehensive ethnography of the Afghan diaspora in Canada but such a feat was out of the scope of this 1-year thesis.

I will now illustrate the design process of the proof-of-concept digital archives, how the interviews informed its creation and the rationale behind my decisions.

3.4 Digital Design Process

Because the participants only provided me with oral histories and did not supply any accompanying materials (i.e. photographs, documents, videos, and so on), the first iteration of this proof-of-concept will be based on a text-only digital design. This was a major design

concept I had to regard because it would prove to inform the selection of the archives’ content management system (CMS). As a text-only based digital design, I did not need to consider a CMS that was made for the presentation of visual materials, such as Omeka which was free, open-source and largely for the exhibition of digital collections of visual, digital objects (i.e. photographs, digitized documents, videos, and so on). I could choose a more familiar, similar CMS that would be also free. As a result, I decided to use the free version of Wordpress.com as the CMS to host the proof-of-concept digital archives. Many community archival initiatives are volunteer-based and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, have very little funding. Therefore, finding a free content management system that works well for its intended use is extremely important for grassroots archival initiates. The reality is that most community archives must start with free resources and I am emulating this by using a free version of Wordpress.com.

Furthermore, presenting the research results to the participants was part of the research requirements outlined by the REB and, as a result, I committed to maintaining the website of the proof-of-concept digital archives for the participants but privately and only visible to them for a maximum of 5 years after the completion of my thesis. After 5 years, the website will be deleted and removed from the internet. This decision was made in the event that I have access to resources, especially funding, in the future to make the digital archives a reality, beyond a proof- of-concept, and in case I decide to pursue this research in a PhD program. As I did not have the resources to pay for the website’s existence for 5 years, my best option was to use the free version of this CMS.

I also chose Wordpress because I was familiar with its services as I had maintained websites through Wordpress in the past and I knew that Wordpress would allow me to make my website private for my participants. Because the website is using a version of Wordpress.com that is free, I am unable to install plugins which prevents the website from having a single, universal password to access it privately. A free, Wordpress.com account does not allow the installation of plugins but if one pays for the “Business” plan tier (or above), one can unlock plugin installation privileges. As a result, I chose to change the privacy settings of the website to “Private” instead of “Public” or “Hidden”, making the website only viewable to myself and the users that I approve.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, I sent my participants invitations through email to become “users” on the private website. When they register as users, the participants are told to make a username and password for themselves in order to have access to the private website; only when they open the link sent individually to their personal email address are they able to become a registered user of the website. This means that each participant has their own username and password for access to the private website, a method that may arguably be more secure than a single, universal password that may be discovered at some point in the future. As a Viewer user of the website, the participants are only able to view the site and are unable to make any changes to it. As the admin, I am able to limit, extend or remove a user’s privileges on the website by giving them different roles if I wanted to (i.e. Contributor, Editor, Administrator, and so on). This kind of user control is critical for the privacy of the participants.

3.4.1 Theme

The next step was to choose a Wordpress theme that was visually minimalist, clean, and simple to navigate as well as free; I selected the “Sela” theme. A Wordpress.com theme determines the colour scheme, layout, and aesthetics of a website. As free themes allow for very little tweaking of the theme’s code, I could only choose the colour schemes - or “palettes” - that were available by the theme’s developer. I picked a black and white palette and began to remove some sections of the theme that were irrelevant to my website (i.e. “Testimonials” section, “Blog” page, and so on). The theme also included a number of stock images that I utilized throughout the digital archives as featured images, headers, and links to different parts of the website. While also being out of the scope of the proof-of-concept digital archives for this thesis, I certainly did not have the time to take my own photos for the website nor did I have the funding to pay for stock images. Again, I reiterate that the point of this design process, at this point, is to utilize free resources as much as possible.

3.4.2 Website Content

This section will provide a brief description of the webpages on the digital archives and present my rationale for the contents.

3.4.2.1 Home Page As the front page of the website, I wanted the digital archives to be as welcoming and familiar to Afghan-Canadians, one of the audiences informed from the oral history interviews, as possible. It is designed to be mirror the gracious hospitality the Afghan people are known for. The first thing it says is “Khush Amaded / Sha Raghlost” which means “Welcome” in Farsi and Pashto respectively, the two major Afghan languages. This is followed by a quick description of the digital archives (“The Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives (ACDA) is home to the diverse and intersectional lived experiences of the Afghan diaspora in Canada”) which ends with “Please, come in.” I chose this phrase because it refers back to the hospitality that Afghans pride themselves in. “Please, come in” is translated into their original Farsi and Pashto beside the English.

Aside from the static menu at the top listing the many pages of the website, underneath these texts are three links to three important pages: the About, Digital Collections, and the specific Browse by Category pages. I believe these pages would be the most attractive to users.

3.4.2.2 About This page was created to explain the contexts of the archive’s creation, especially its purpose as a platform for Afghan-Canadian experiences and as a pedagogical resource for the community. The beginning provides a mission and vision for the archives and especially reveals its existence as a form of resistance: “This archive hopes to be a platform for resistance against prevailing negative, stereotypical narratives on Afghan-Canadians perpetuated by mainstream media institutions.” The last part of this page provides a background and context for the archive’s creation, specifically about how it came to be through this thesis. It admits that the website was largely informed by the six participants of the thesis project and further explains the positionalities of the participants for better context on the digital design.

3.4.2.3 Policies & Procedures This section is largely meant to house content pertaining to the structure of the archives, specifically the policies, scope, and direction that the archives will take. The page explains the definition of “Afghan-Canadian” as an individual or family that self-identifies as Afghan and is a refugee, permanent resident or citizen of Canada. The archives will also include records of

organizations that cater largely to the Afghan diaspora in Canada. In order to protect the privacy and security of the contributors, the archives includes a strict take-down policy. This means that if a contributor later wishes to remove their materials from the digital archives, it will be taken down as soon as possible without questions asked. In order to prevent further similar situations or reasons from occurring, naturally, attempts would be made to understand the contexts surrounding the choice but if they do not provide a reason, that is sufficient for the archives as well. Finally, the page also includes some information on how the research identified the possible lack of digital literacy in the elder immigrant and/or parent generation to be wholly informed to contribute as donors to the digital archives and how the archives was going to manage that. It advocates for funding of digital literacy workshops in the preferred, primary languages of the elders and declares that the digital archives will not reach out to this demographic until they attend a digital literacy workshop or unless the archives is convinced by their informed consent in English.

It is important to note that a full, complete and community-driven acquisitions policy cannot be made at this time without further community consultation. The scope of this thesis attempted to enter the field for the first time to understand the possible archival needs. The point was to extend a hand into the community and see how, or even if, they would take it. As Chapter 2 shows, there are many roles the digital archives could take and many ways in which it would be used. Further fieldwork would be able to flesh out a more comprehensive policy that could hopefully also be iterative: as the community grows and changes throughout time, the archive can consistently return to the community to update their acquisitions policy.

3.4.2.4 Digital Collections As mentioned previously, the only digital artefacts on the website are oral history audio files at the moment and the digital design reflects this reality. I use the more American term “collection” instead of the Canadian archival equivalent “fonds” because my participants identified two audiences for the digital archives: 1) the Afghan diaspora in Canada and 2) Canadians outside of the Afghan diaspora. What both these audiences have in common is that they are both non- researcher audiences; the participants want the digital archives to be accessible to the common Canadian.

How to read a collection

I included this page as a guide to understanding how the collections and digital artefacts were exhibited on the digital archives. Each participant’s collection page starts with a brief description of the participant, information that they had provided either through the oral history recording or independently. The descriptive elements used are limited, for the scope of this thesis project:

● Name: the participant's name or pseudonym ● Afghan Identity: however the participant identified themself. This could include ethnic identity, tribal affiliation and so on. ● Regional Background: the region/city/province the participant identifies with. ● Primary Afghan language: the primary Afghan language that they speak / are familiar with. ● Time in Canada: the amount of time the participant had spent living in Canada from the point of the interview. ● Date of Interview: the date that the oral history was conducted. The descriptive elements are meant to showcase the diverse identities of the participants as highlighted in the research rationale and provide context for the oral history interview. The creation of a fuller community-driven descriptive standard would also need to be created but was out of the scope of this thesis project. See the Required Features section below for more on the potential descriptive standard. Finally, this page ends with an explanation of the “Impressions” descriptive element under each oral history interview. "Impressions" is a thought, note, memory or opinion that I had during or after that specific interview. Again, this is meant for context and awareness of my presence and positionality in the oral history interview. Each participant’s collection has space for potential material to accompany the oral history but none of the participants provided any. Nevertheless, currently, the focus of each page is the oral history.

Browse by Collection and Browse by Category

At the moment, the digital archives has two options for browsing of materials: by collection or category. Browsing by collection simply allows the user to discover all materials originating from a single provenance, either an individual, family or organization. At the moment, the page only links to the participants’ collections

I chose to create an option to browse by category because the participants mentioned multiple types of material they wanted to see in more than one language. For example, there were mentions of seeing wedding videos, attan8 videos, long-form conversations, “underdog” success stories, and so on. Each theme or topic has its own category and users can choose to look up materials across collections that fall under their chosen category. Furthermore, it is important to also be able to categorize materials by language so to reflect the variety of languages spoken by Afghan people and to ensure that users can look for materials in their preferred language. Another important category is “Media Type” which exists for users that want to be able to look for a specific type of material. The participants had mentioned that they wanted to see videos, photographs, audio files (podcasts), poetry and so on. Users can also browse by Canadian region or Afghan identity: a user can view stories from contributors living in the Canadian Maritimes or, perhaps, diaspora members who trace their background to Afghanistan’s Balkh province. This feature is meant to allow the Afghan diaspora to explore the vast intersectionality of the community and give them a chance to learn more about their own intersections.

At the moment, there are only a few categories but I expect that the real digital archives will have far more as it grows and receives contributions.

3.4.2.5 History As mentioned in Chapter 2, the participants identified the need for a pedagogical resource for themselves and many of them also wanted the archives to educate them on Afghan history, culture, and heritage. This page is meant to house educational resources. Obviously, the scope of this thesis did not include creating educational community resources, such as the history of the diaspora, but it has the potential to include them. Further funding and research would be needed to provide such resources as well as increased community consultation to determine anything else that other intersections of the community may want to see.

8 Attan is a traditional dance often considered Afghanistan’s national dance and has its origins in the Pashtun ethnic group.

3.4.2.6 Contribute This page simply explains how a potential contributor can get into contact with the digital archives to contribute their own materials to the archives. It includes my name, email address, and phone number.

3.4.2.7 Contact Finally, the last page includes a standard contact form that any viewer of the website could fill out if they want to communicate with ACDA.

3.4.3 Required Features

The following features were informed by the oral history interviews and are required. As will become obvious, most of these have not been implemented in the current design because of their complexity and the lack of funds to include such features. This website is meant to be a proof-of- concept and, as such, the following are only a smattering of features that will need to be included in a final Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives if it were ever created beyond this proof-of-concept.

Description Standard

One of the most important decisions that need to be made is the description standard that would be utilized to describe the digital artefacts. At the moment, as I explained above in How to read a collection, I created six descriptive elements according to the personal information I received through the interviews: Name, Afghan Identity, Regional Background, Primary Afghan language, Time in Canada, and Date of Interview. Although I created these descriptive elements, the digital archives should ultimately follow a flexible descriptive standard that is widely supported by content management systems, used to describe digital artefacts, and also able to be conform to community needs as necessary. After conducting the oral history interviews, I would suggest a Dublin Core standard to meet these requirements. Although most Canadian mainstream, major archival institutions follow the Rules for Archival Description (RAD) overseen by the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA), the participants did not identify a researcher/academic audience for the digital archives. Furthermore, RAD is often mostly understandable by academic researchers who use archival materials regularly and expect to see this descriptive standard in Canadian archives. As a result, I decided that the digital archives

could use a modified Dublin Core standard that would need to be developed in consultation with community advisors.

Metadata Tags

At the moment, with a free version of Wordpress.com, I was not able to create metadata tags for each collection, however, this feature would be necessary in order to create metadata for the collections and item-level digital artefacts so that they can be placed under different categories for the “Browse by Category” option. There should be seamless links between the metadata tags for each digital artefact and the categories listed under the “Browse by Category” option.

Translation and Languages

At the moment, the free Wordpress.com website provides a translation function using Google Translate that can translate each page of the website. I tested the feature on a few pages and can conclude that it does not translate exactly into Farsi. Nevertheless, the ability to translate the website accurately is an important requirement that I gleaned from my participants as well. Being able to toggle between the different Afghan languages will allow for a myriad of users to access the knowledge accumulated on the digital archives. Those that are more comfortable in a certain language over English (my strongest language) can still connect with the materials. A tri- lingual site would be yet another important requirement for this community.

Password Protection

The digital archives will support contributors that wish to limit or control access to their digital artefacts and collection. As a result, the website requires that those webpages should have password protection. As it stands, the free Wordpress.com version supports the password- protection of chosen webpages.

Accommodating File Types

Although I did not receive accompanying materials to the oral history audio files, the participants certainly explained to me their information-seeking preferences, most of which were photographs with captions, videos, and podcasts. Currently a text-based only digital archives, in the future, the ACDA should be able to accommodate further file types because, as an organic, iterative digital archives, no one can assume to know beforehand what the contributors will

donate. However, it is best to at least be prepared to integrate materials such as photographs, videos, and audio files (for podcasts or interviews) because the research participants admitted to consuming those media types the most.

Advanced Search

Currently, the proof-of-concept has a basic search bar provided by the free Wordpress.com service, however, there needs to be a more advanced search option. For example, it would be useful for users to be able to filter between the different categories when browsing by category. They could, for instance, look specifically for audio files that are in the Pashto language by contributors hailing from the province of British Columbia. This kind of filtering will allow users to find the exact items or collections that they desire.

3.5 Chapter Summary

This chapter began with an explanation of the iterative digital design method used for the creation of the proof-of-concept digital archives and transitioned to describing the current state of the Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives proof-of-concept website. I demonstrated how the research participants, a small group of individuals that represent a number of intersections of the Afghan diaspora in Canada, informed the CMS choice, the different webpages of the website, and the policies that were created. Furthermore, the chapter outlined the current required features that the digital archives ought to have, again inspired by the research participants, but could not be implemented for the scope of this thesis because of their complexity and the lack of funds to achieve them. The following chapter will construct a summary of the findings of this research and provide further suggests for future research.

CONCLUSION

Chapter Overview

This chapter will begin with a summary of the thesis. This section will reiterate the research findings in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 to demonstrate how seemingly-unrelated methodologies found in this thesis - critical ethnography, iterative design and speculative computing - can work together to develop concrete conclusions and decisions. I will also explain how the thesis is situated among a variety of research fields. Finally, I will conclude with recommendations for future studies that are informed by this research.

Thesis Summary

Using a community-driven and critical ethnographic approach, this thesis determined the community-specific, intersectional archival needs of a group of Afghan diaspora members who have lived in Canada for 10 or more years and, simultaneously, demonstrated that this approach can ethically inform the creation of a digital archive. This research also established that an iterative design and speculative computing method to create the proof-of-concept digital archives is a community-driven methodology. Both methods allow for data that emerges from oral histories to influence the design and the methodology will continue to support future community needs as necessary. Critical ethnography clearly backs iterative and speculative computing in digital design, and vice versa.

The findings of the critical ethnography (see Chapter 2) demonstrate that the Afghan diaspora in Canada, more specifically the intersection of the diaspora represented in this thesis, undoubtedly believe that a digital archives could provide solutions to problems that they see in their community: symbolic annihilation of minority identities within the community; the lack of a pedagogical resource on the community’s history and stories; and the desire for a platform to showcase their successful integration to all Canadians.

The symbolic annihilation of marginalized identities within the diaspora itself can be rectified largely through the sheer existence of the digital archives itself and its commitment to advocate

for intersectionality. Further, the ability to browse by categories will also assist in illuminating the various identities. For example, one could essentially browse by ethnic group, religiosity, language, and so on. The iterative design methodology also allows for the creation of new categories as the different identities of the diaspora emerges through the archives’ categories and metadata.

Many participants of this research admitted to insufficient knowledge of their community’s history, heritage, culture, and lived experiences. As expressed in Chapter 2, the digital archives could become the desired resource because the oral histories and future digital artefacts are created by Afghan diaspora members themselves. They are living history and the grassroots, low-cost model provides the community an opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. The digital archives promotes history as told by those who witnessed it and this can be gleaned by the open call for contributions on the “Contribute” page. The archives’ advocacy for digital literacy workshops for the older generation of Afghan-Canadians is another way the digital archives is already attempting to become a pedagogical resource. Although the “History” page is empty at the moment, its existence describes the potential for further research on the community and urges for support for more educational resources.

A desire passed down from lawmakers, from the perspective of my participants, successful integration and assimilation into Canadian society seems to be an important performance that should be demonstrated to the rest of Canadian society for societal acceptance. Many of the participants believed that displaying their “Canadian-ness” to non-Afghan-Canadians would be a beneficial, secondary use for the digital archives. Because this research now needed to consider a non-Afghan audience, the digital design provides for this through its potential initiative to foster research on the history of the diaspora and its public existence. The digital archive does not aim to be a secret or protected through a community-only password. There may be pages that contributors can password-protect but otherwise, the rest of the website is open. Users can also browse by Canadian region for collections from diaspora members living across the country, thus reinforcing the “Canadian-ness” of the diaspora to a situated Canadian location. The fact that this research project purposefully defined “Afghan-Canadian” as an individual that can trace their heritage to Afghanistan, self-identify as Afghan, and lives in Canada also emphasizes the participants’ Canadian heritage.

“Archiving Afghan-Canadian Long-time Settlement Experiences: Emergent Methods & Digital Design” demonstrated that a critical ethnography of an identity-based community - in this case, Afghan-Canadians - is a crucial first step to understanding their archival needs and, thus, being able to ethically, faithfully, and responsibly document their lived experiences. This approach clearly transfers the power over their representation from the larger, mainstream Canadian institutions (i.e. mainstream media, major archival institutions such as LAC, and so on) to the marginalized community as they gain the opportunity to speak for themselves. Furthermore, the digital design methodologies of iterative design and speculative computing worked well with the community-driven objective of this initiative as it emphasized creation through iterative community consultation instead of fitting newly-acquired digital artefacts into a pre-made template.

Furthermore, this research also situates itself in the growing literature of studies conducted on/about Afghan-Canadians. Instead of focusing on the settlement experiences of newly-arrived Afghans in Canada or those using settlement agencies and, for the most part, painting all Afghans with one brush with their findings, this research attempted to raise awareness for the diverse identities of the Afghan diaspora in Canada. It stresses the importance of considering intersectionality when conducting research on/about Afghan-Canadians.

Implications for Future Research

Many considerations arise from this thesis for possible future research questions. I will consider the future of two main fields that require further research.

On/About Afghan-Canadians by Afghan-Canadians

As mentioned several times throughout this thesis, research on or about the Afghan- Canadian experience is usually comparative (i.e. comparing Iranian immigrants with Afghan immigrants) and often fixate on assessing settlement and integration experiences of newly- arrived Afghans in Canada using settlement agencies. Although the Afghan diaspora is younger than many immigrant groups in Canada, they have been part of Canadian society for four decades and thus have the right to be accurately represented in Canadian history, media, and research. However, currently, damage-centered narratives prevail because intersectionality is

almost never considered when conducting such research. It is important for further studies to realize that there are Afghan diaspora members in Canada that are born Canadian or were raised in Canada from a young age; both groups know nothing else but life in Canada. Future research should concentrate on this silenced community and their lived experiences.

On that note, studies conducted on/about Afghan-Canadians are usually not led by Afghan- Canadian researchers. This causes problems such as the lack of understanding for the diversity of the community, as I already mentioned, and the community’s cultural protocols. I recognize that I was in a unique position to be able to have easy access to the research population on account of my own identity as an Afghan-Canadian. Future researchers that are not Afghan-Canadian may have a more difficult time accessing long-time settled Afghan-Canadians but I was able to use my connection with the community to locate my participants with relative ease as they were all friends or acquaintances. I was only capable of identifying the absence of Afghan-Canadian voices that have lived in Canada for 10 or more years in research studies because I, myself, am an Afghan-Canadian that has lived in Canada for more than 10 years. I knew that my lived experiences were not reflected in the academic literature. If future research studies expect to gain access to the Afghan diaspora members in Canada that are not using settlement agencies (i.e. are newly-arrived to the country) in an ethical, respectful, and accurate way, they must use Afghan- Canadian researchers because they will usually be cognizant of community protocols and most likely already has some relationship with the community.

The Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives (ACDA)

Throughout this research process, I learned much more about my own diaspora in Canada than I had ever known before, despite identifying as an Afghan-Canadian myself. Discovering research that purports to be all about Afghan-Canadians but not seeing myself reflected in those studies was a turning point for me and a major motivator to do this study. Combining my observations as an Afghan-Canadian actively involved in my community and the information gathered from my participants, I deduced that there is a hunger for faithful representation in the intersection of the Afghan diaspora that I am connected with. And not just representation but rich, thick description in the community’s tongue, voice, and knowledge-making expressions. This thesis demonstrates how that can be achieved through the creation of a digital archive for this identity-based community. Any fellow Afghan diaspora member that inquired after the topic of my thesis

would brim with excitement at the idea of a digital archive for the community; I was often overwhelmed by the support and enthusiasm.

However, the Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives remains only a proof-of-concept, an initiative yet to be realized despite the glaring desire for it. As was discussed in Chapter 2, the research population of this study was restricted to Afghan diaspora members in Canada that are in their 20’s at the time of this study and consisted exclusively of my friends and acquaintances. This is a small intersection of the diaspora. A far larger, multi-year critical ethnography would need to be commissioned to understand as many intersections of the community as possible for a more rigorously representative picture of the community. Additionally, a future initiative on the creation of The Afghan-Canadian Digital Archives needs to have the necessary funding that can support the community’s digital design needs. A proof-of-concept digital archives is only the beginning: to do justice to the Afghan diaspora in Canada, significant research must be conducted about this community.

Although this thesis pointed out a community’s desire for a digital archives to, essentially, mend certain problems within the community itself, that does not mean that a digital archives could in reality successfully fix all of the community-identified issues. Although there could certainly be superior alternatives, ACDA could, at the very least, start conversations on the identified issues within the community. Similarly, this research was always meant to be a starting point, a small- scale model, on the identity-formation and archival representation of more intersections of Afghan-Canadians and my hope is that this original study informs further research initiatives to consider the uniqueness, liveliness, and joy of my community.

How an ethnic community sees, represents, and performs its ethnicity are crucial discussions that are happening in many different humanities and social science fields. We need more of these discussions to penetrate the archival field because archives are always, and have always been, in the business of identity. What is and what is not in archives tells you who does and who does not have power.

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