Raising History from the Grave: Reparative Archival Pedagogy, International Virtual Exchange, and Community Engagement

This article brings together three threads in digital pedagogy: international virtual exchange, archival recovery work, and reparative pedagogy to argue that their convergence generates a transformative framework for reimaging critical archival practice and transnational collaborations. Our argument is supported by two related pedagogical projects that we undertook. The first is a collaboration with Pan Caribbean Sankofa (PCS) and the Panama Canal Museum Collection (PCMC) at the University of Florida (UF). The second is a collaborative online international learning (COIL) exchange that took place between two undergraduate classes at a university in the Eastern Caribbean and UF. Both initiatives were grounded in a collaboration with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). Both explored Caribbean mourning practices, highlighting Afro-Caribbeans’ proximity to death and violence as well their erasure from historical records. Both afforded students and faculty the opportunity to share cultural knowledge and collaborate on archival projects across national boundaries. Based on these two projects, we propose a framework that leverages international virtual exchange to connect instructors and students across universities and national borders with libraries, civic organizations, and community archives throughout the Caribbean and its diaspora. We argue that this model provides students with meaningful experience in archival research, digital humanities, and international collaboration. It empowers civic organizations and community archives to develop research-driven public humanities initiatives that document their communities. Because students collaborate directly with communities to increase their archival presence, they fill gaps in colonial archives while also engaging in liberatory archival reclamation that assist with present‑day justice efforts and decolonial care. We envision this approach as a sustainable model for building (dLOC) as a dynamic teaching commons that supports collaborative teaching, research, and community engagement.