Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson Archive Conference, “Archiving Resistance: Activating the Black Radical Tradition”

For over four decades, the late Cedric Robinson—former chair of UCSB’s Black Studies and Political Science departments who passed away in 2016—and Elizabeth Robinson, a veteran educator and long-time advisor for KCSB-FM, treated the campus and the surrounding community as a shared space. Together, they created independent media platforms like the Third World News Review, giving voice to internationalist perspectives often excluded from mainstream news.

That legacy found a permanent home in 2024 when Elizabeth Robinson and her daughter, Nadja Robinson-Mayer, donated their extensive collection of papers, recordings, and ephemera to UCSB Library. Preserving the materials and making them research-accessible was the first major step, and now the project is going further, embracing innovative practices like post-custodial archiving.

”The idea was not just to acquire archives and digitize them but to create a living archive,” said Diane Fujino, a professor of Asian American Studies who was involved in the creation of the archives. “From the start we wanted to have international and national scholars to come use the archives and expand them.”

That vision has evolved into active partnerships that bypass traditional, extractive archiving models. “We want to partner with smaller community-based archives, help them organize and digitize their materials and take the digital copies to link back to the anchor collection, so the digital copies and relationship with the community archive is preserved so there is no extraction of the documents,” said Charlie Hale, Dean of Social Sciences.

Building on these community-based practices is a key goal of the Robinson Archive, explained Angel Diaz, Curator for the California Ethnic & Multicultural Archives (CEMA) and the History of California & the American West in the Department of Special Research Collections.

“The Robinson Archive initiative aims to be in community with people, so the goals of the community are at the forefront of out practices,” she said. “Old school special collections and archives want to hold the most precious things they can collect, but what this project aims to do is help work that is being done by communities and organizations across the country with preserving and memory keeping. As we know. the history books can be subjective in some ways, and it is really important that these communities are at the forefront in leading the preservation of their histories.”

The initiative currently collaborates directly with groups like NAKASEC (a Korean American organization doing immigrant work across six cities in the Unites States) and The Baobab Center for Innovation in Ethnic-Racial, Gender and Environmental Justice, an initiative created by Afro-descendant social and community organizations in Colombia to contribute to transforming ethnic-racial, gender, and environmental injustices and dismantling the power structures that perpetuate them.

One of Baobab’s projects that the Robinson Archive is supporting is Insurgent Subjectivities, a collaborative research project on the 2021 social uprising in Cali. The project documents oral narratives and audiovisual materials from participants in the uprising.

“The Robinson Archive is helping advance Baobab’s mission by supporting the creation of a community-oriented digital repository that preserves these oral narratives, photographs, videos, and other materials while making them accessible for political education and community use,” said Tathagatan Ravindran, an anthropologist working with Baobab.

The Robinson Archive conference includes sessions bringing into sharp focus the resurgence of global fascism, imperial rivalries, the geopolitical context of the US-Israeli war on the Middle East, and the erosion of academic freedom, alongside practical workshops on community-based archival methods.

“The university and the community are not separate,” said Maeghan Miller-Likhethe, co-director of the initiative. “Cedric and Elizabeth didn’t see them as separate either. We are not going to back down; we are going to lean even more strongly into amplifying these histories and bringing them to bear on our present struggles.”