Something I've been thinking about in a couple of different contexts re: privilege/oppression + insider/outsider dynamics is that when we are the privileged insider seeking to listen to marginalized outsiders we need to be mindful that marginalized people don't speak w/one voice.

In the #archives field we sometimes talk about community-led, community-controlled archives spaces and collections as if this is the answer to our dilemmas of representation. What we need to give up is the idea that The Community has a unified perspective.

That the people of The Community, if consulted, will resolve our questions about how a collection or object should be cared for, described, made accessible. In reality, people within The Community will disagree -- sometimes deeply and insolubly -- with one another.

This should not stop us from centering the perspectives of people within The Communities relevant in specific cases, but we need to get comfortable sitting with disagreement and disunity and give up on the idea that consulting The Communities in question is a magic solution.

An example of this from one of my own contextual communities: There are materials created within the queer community by individuals and groups that, at the time of creation, specified who could access those creations.

In the 1970s many lesbian feminists were separatists, and explicitly limited access to their publications to other lesbian feminist separatists. Assuming the creator group and/or individuals in question have died or cannot be traced, how do we handle access to these items?

Some queer community archivists, scholars, and activists would argue that the wishes of the creators, to the extent that they can be known, should be honored to the best of our ability.

Some queer community archivists, scholars and activists would argue that access to those materials by a wider group of people (people who don't identify currently as lesbian feminist separatists) is necessary to tell the story of lesbian feminist separatism fully.

And also, therefore, arguing that it is a story that *should* be told. Some in the queer community might argue that story, belonging to those who lived it, should remain protected knowledge not shared beyond the borders of separatist spaces. That forgetting the story honors it.

As a historian and reference librarian I spend a lot of nights staring at the ceiling at 2am thinking about the right to be forgotten and how I both respect that position and worry it would enable future harms.

None of these uncertainties absolve us as archivists (or researchers or recordmakers) from the duty to weigh these ethical questions and decide upon a path forward in our own unique cases of creation, collection, access, and interpretation.