Digital Archives, Knowledge Conflicts, and Epistemic Injustices in the Himalayas

This research examines the tactics employed by digital archive projects focused on Himalayan histories and cultures to navigate knowledge conflicts. While digital archives offer the means to provide visibility and increase the accessibility and recognition to marginalized communities, they inevitably give rise to knowledge conflicts, which may lead to epistemic injustices. Through interviews with contributors to Himalayan digital archives, we find that these projects attempt to navigate knowledge conflicts and address epistemic injustices by drawing on inclusive, participatory, and activist-oriented practices. We discuss the importance of surfacing conflicts when designing tools and practices for collaboration and cooperation within digital archives. Doing so, we argue, can help contextualize historical issues in the present and strengthen advocacy efforts against ongoing socio-environmental injustices. Finally, we highlight the opportunity for reconfiguring digital archives as digital commons to foster commoning practices and enable postcustodial, co-created, and self-governed archival infrastructures.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.