Editorial Type:
Article Category: Review Article
 | 
Online Publication Date: 01 Mar 2018

Diversity, Dialogue and Sharing: Online Resources for a More Resourceful World

Page Range: 244 – 249
DOI: 10.17723/0360-9081-81.1.244
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By
Francine Saillant
Paris, France
UNESCO
2017 129
pp. Open Access PDF. Freely available at unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002487/248717e.pdf. ISBN
978-92-3-100217-5

“We probably know much more about wars and conflicts between communities and nations than we do about the forms of life which foster rapprochement, dialogue and cohesion,” notes Canadian anthropologist Francine Saillant in her open access book, Diversity, Dialogue and Sharing: Online Resources for a More Resource World (p. 18). The book seeks to counter this imbalance by promoting online resources on intercultural dialogue and cultural rapprochement, building on earlier United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) regional mapping initiatives that assessed the state of digitization of intercultural resources. I wholeheartedly agree that there is a need to talk about not only conflict and war, but also about the many ways in which a constellation of people, institutions, and societal structures work to build solidarities and foster peaceful and respectful relations of mutual benefit between people around the world. We are daily bombarded with a barrage of news about war, hate, and conflict, which ultimately serves to normalize and maintain these violences as much as to expose or compel action against them. Realizing social change, ending war, embracing diversity, eradicating racism and patriarchy, overcoming colonialism—all these require not only the ability to identify and analyze the problem, but also the perhaps more challenging capacity to imagine and model new approaches and alternative futurities. According to its author, this short (a mere 129 pages), easy to navigate, and accessible book seeks to inspire and inform further efforts aimed at realizing greater understanding and rapprochement between and within societies and groups.

Published by UNESCO, Diversity, Dialogue and Sharing provides a selective mapping of online resources that promote intercultural dialogue by a variety of organizations from different spheres of life. As the foreword by Nada Al-Nashi, assistant director-general for Social and Human Sciences at UNESCO, explains, the organization commissioned and published this book as the conceptual blueprint for the development of its “ePlatform on intercultural dialogue” (p. 9).1 Made possible by donations from the government of Azerbaijan, the book presents research that is based on the work of an international committee of experts and consultants representing the various regions (as established by UNESCO) of the world.2 A specialist in the anthropology of human rights and the social construction of difference, Saillant served both as a member of this committee, as well as the author of the book under review here that reports on its work. The project and book, in turn, are an initiative that addresses the International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures (2013–2022) led by UNESCO within the United Nations (UN) system.3 UNESCO as an institutional setting is well suited for this kind of initiative. A child of the Second World War, UNESCO was established as a UN specialized agency and, according to its constitution, is mandated to promote collaboration among nations in the fields of education, science, culture, and communication to foster peace and universal respect for human rights.4 The book and the project from which it arose are only two of a long series of collaborative activities and publications that developed under the aegis of UNESCO on topics like intercultural dialogue or diversity that promote the increased sharing and dissemination of information and resources. While the book may serve its institutional goals well, it will likely not prove as relevant to the general public or archivists as some other UNESCO publications have.5 It is mainly a project report of work done by a UNESCO expert committee rather than a book for public consumption.

Diversity, Dialogue and Sharing is divided into three parts: an introduction outlining the institutional context, framework, and methodology of the book; a second section that provides a region-based mapping of shared and shareable resources on cultural rapprochement; and a third section that cuts across these regions to group initiatives according to various themes and subthemes, while zoning in on local, countrywide, and city-based initiatives. A few subthemes in the last section include: “Openness and Flows”; “Heritage and Diversity”; “Language and Diversity”; “Religions and Diversity”; and “Peace Initiatives.” Archives and museums are discussed in the “Culture, Creation and Diversity” subsection (pp. 95–98), which provides a cursory listing of national museums and archives initiatives in North America and Western Europe that engage the public in diversity issues. For example, the author touches briefly on museum initiatives on immigrants like the Migration Museum Project in England and the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration in the United States; and she mentions the efforts of national archival institutions in Canada and Mexico to provide digital access to their holdings. The annex of selected e-resources provides a handy list of relevant websites for readers to explore resources and learn more about institutions or projects profiled, including those pertaining to archives and museums.

The book comes at a time when issues of diversity and reconciliation are of great concern to the North American archival community. One needs only think of the debates emerging from professional library and archival associations in Canada and the United States in the wake of the 2016 presidential election on the impact of a Trump administration on equity-seeking groups and on the ability of librarians, archivists, and information professionals to fulfill their mandate to serve their diverse publics.6 In Canada, scarcely an archival conference or association meeting has not engaged the topic of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its Calls to Action, four of which are directly addressed to archives and museums.7 For example, at the Association of Canadian Archivists meeting in Ottawa in June 2017, the closing keynote featured Eugene Arcand, a Cree member of the Survivors Circle of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation associated with the TRC. The recent launch of the open access publication, the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, with its many articles on diversity, social justice, and equity issues in both libraries and archives, also attests to the increasing saliency of these issues.

Clearly, Saillant's book is a timely intervention that has the potential to be of interest to archival scholars and practitioners seeking examples of how different social institutions have sought to foster respectful relations between people and societies. The broad definition of diversity Saillant adopts is of note; by insisting that diversity is understood and expressed differently around the world but is inherent to all groups and regions, the book attempts to shift the loci of the diversity paradigm from a Eurocentric orientation to a broader positionality (pp. 23–27). This definition is flexible and situational rather than absolute and universal. The author argues that all societies are invariably diverse and, in turn, that “while no one society possesses the one perfect and ideal solution for bringing cultures together, each society holds some of the answers we are seeking” (p. 18). Certainly, no universal or one-size-fits-all solution addresses all forms of oppression in the world. Archivists would do well to keep this fact in mind as they continue to explore and work toward a more nuanced, critical understanding of their ethical responsibilities.

The book's treatment of its subject matter is rather uneven, and it is not clear from the brief methodology section what criteria were used in the selection of the information resources profiled. In Canada, for example, the book outlines resources by research centers like Centre de recherches en cultures-arts-sociétés, universities like Université du Québec à Montréal, initiatives on women like FemNorthNet, and various provincial and federal governmental bodies—but no mention is made of the TRC and its historic work, or the highly visible Indigenous-led campaigns for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirit people, or the related efforts at establishing a national inquiry on the issue (pp. 85, 89–90). The only criteria we are provided—that the resources selected “are the best quality and most significant ones, that is, those that would be understandable for a wide readership and that are iconic, illustrative and inspiring for a given region or country” (p. 34)—would certainly apply to these cases. These omissions seem inexplicable given the wide public attention these efforts have received in Canada and internationally, and the extensive online resources they have generated. Profiling these initiatives would have also provided the author an opportunity to mitigate the tendency of the book to focus on initiatives by Western states and institutions while presenting Indigenous peoples as the target rather than the instigators or leaders of such initiatives.

At a deeper level, then, there is a disconnect between the stated goal of understanding diversity and intercultural dialogue outside of Eurocentric and state-centric frameworks, and the ways in which the selection and profiling of resources emphasizes the agency and approaches of Western actors and nation-states against non-Western societies and nonstate actors, including Indigenous peoples. Other examples of the Eurocentricism of the book include the suggestion that Indigenous peoples and Arab countries like Saudi Arabia are outside modernity (pp. 76, 90); the singling out of the Arab world (as established by UNESCO) as a region of gender inequality and terrorism; and the repeated use of the misleading term “New World.” These are examples of the disconnect between the stated commitment to move beyond a Eurocentric framework, and the tendency of the book to orient itself according to Western understandings of modernity, geography, and history.

The book generally has a patchwork feeling to it, a sense that different parts reflect contradictory frameworks and modes of analysis. This unevenness may be due to the collective process of producing the material for the book by a committee of experts and consultants despite its single authorship. An argument may be made for maintaining such inconsistencies within documents produced through international collaborations rather than editorially glossing over differences and incommensurabilities for the sake of presenting a single, coherent authorial voice. In such a case, some acknowledgment and reflection would be necessary for readers to better engage the text. Wendy Duff and Verne Harris provided an excellent example of how this can be addressed in a 2002 article explaining the authors' different positionalities and approaches, and how they attempted to balance the need for a coherent voice with the commitment to not gloss over tensions but, rather, to embrace them creatively and productively.8 They are also explicit about which sections were drafted by each author. Diversity, Dialogue and Sharing may have benefited from this kind of transparency about the writing and research process. As it currently stands, and given its brief engagement with archives, the book may prove of limited usefulness for the archival community despite its timeliness.

Notes

1 The URL provided for this portal on that page, http://en.unesco.org/2pxVJWp, was not accessible at the time of writing this review. A “Page not found” message was returned when I visited the website in August and September 2017.

2 The regions reflect UNESCO's schema whereby member countries are divided into the following geographic areas: Africa; the Arab world; the Asia-Pacific region; Latin America and the Caribbean; and Europe and North America.

3 On the International Decades or the Rapprochement of Cultures, see UNESCO, Action Plan, International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures 2013–2022 (Paris: UNESCO, 2014).

4 There is an extensive cross-disciplinary literature on UNESCO. Some often-cited sources on its mandate, history, philosophy, and relevant activities include Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1947); Richard Hoggart, An Idea and Its Servants: UNESCO from Within (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); James Patrick Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics: Engaging in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); Clare Well, The UN, UNESCO and the Politics of Knowledge (London: MacMillan Press, 1987); S. Nihal Singh, The Rise and Fall of UNESCO (Ahmedabad, Calcutta, New Delhi, India: Allied Press, 1988); Fernando Valderrama Martínez, A History of UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1995); Vincenzo Pavone, From the Labyrinth of the World to the Paradise of the Heart: Science and Humanism in UNESCO's Approach to Globalization (Lanham, Md., and Toronto: Lexington Books, 2008); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Place: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origin of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009); J. P. Singh, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): Creating Norms for a Complex World (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); and Poul Duedahl, ed., A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

5 I am thinking here, for example, of UNESCO's popular manifesto on the public library, The Public Library: A Living Force for Popular Education (Paris: UNESCO, May 16, 1949). The manifesto, published in poster and leaflet form, was quickly circulated to member states, primarily via UNESCO national commissions, in tens of thousands of copies, in English, French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and Arabic. Today's manifesto, revised and updated to reflect changes in the library field, remains faithful to the original version and is still actively distributed and widely functioning. Another example is UNESCO's four statements on race, which were also widely circulated: “Statement on Race” (Paris, July 1950); “Statement on the nature of race and race differences (Paris, June 1951); “Proposals on the biological aspects of race” (Moscow, August 1964); and “Statement on race and racial prejudice” (Paris, September 1967). On the public library manifesto, see Amanda Laugesen, “UNESCO and the Globalization of the Public Library Idea, 1948 to 1965,” Library and Information History 30, no. 1 (2014): 1–19; and Miriam Intrator, “UNESCO, Reconstruction, and Pursuing Peace through a ‘Library-Minded’ World, 1945–1950,” in A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts, ed. Poul Duedahl (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). For critical discussion of the four statements on race, see Anthony Q. Hazard, Postwar Anti-racism: The United States, UNESCO, and “Race,” 1945–1968 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

6 For relevant discussion, see Paul T. Jaeger, Ursula Gorham, Natalie Greene Taylor, and Karen Kettnich, “Aftermath of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election for Libraries: Axioms, Foxes, and the Urgencies of Now,” Library Quarterly 87, no. 3 (2017): 189–94; and Nadia Caidi, J. J. Ghaddar, and Danielle Allard, “Negotiating Borders: Librarianship and Twenty-First-Century Politics,” Library Quarterly 87, no. 4 (2017): 391–409. These articles are part of a special two-volume edition of Library Quarterly on the theme of “Aftermath: Libraries, Democracy, and the 2016 Presidential Election.”

7 A number of other Calls to Action also have the potential to impact archival practice. For archival scholarship on the TRC, see Lisa P. Nathan, Elizabeth Schaffer, and Maggie Caster, “Stewarding Collections of Trauma: Plurality, Responsibility, and Questions of Action,” Archivaria 80 (Fall 2015): 89–118; J. J. Ghaddar, “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory,” Archivaria 82 (Fall 2016): 3–26; and Greg Bak, Tolly Bradford, Jessie Loyer, and Elizabeth Walker, “Four Views on Archival Decolonization Inspired by the TRC's Calls to Action,” Fonds d'Archives 1 (2017): 1–21.

8 Wendy Duff and Verne Harris, “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 263–85, 265–66.

Copyright: © The Society of American Archivists, 2018. All Rights Reserved.
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