An Essay on Evidence and Authority
Movements themselves are important sites of knowledge production. They have the potential to illuminate how young people, often under 25 years old, shape the entire nation for the better. Their history is our public patrimony, one that should not be held hostage by bureaucratic restrictions that universities and archives often follow. Public access to creativity and memory, not reserved or made secret, has the potential to open up gatekeeping so that scholars and archivists are not the center of reference for knowledge production. This essay examines topics of extractive versus collaborative scholarship, oral history methodologies, and documentary epistemologies to address two questions: Who gets to tell the story? What counts as historical evidence? These are deceptively simple questions and so vital to knowledge production that this essay at the end of the book addresses them more thoroughly. Such inquiries lead to thornier issues underneath: who gets to establish what does and does not “count” as documentary evidence on freedom movements, and thus what is left in the archive for future generations of civic actors to build on?