Lae’l Hughes-Watkins

Lae’l Hughes-Watkins is the Founder of Project STAND, a radical grassroots archival consortia project between colleges and universities around the country; to create a centralized digital space highlighting analog and digital collections emphasizing student activism in marginalized communities. Project STAND aims to foster ethical documentation of contemporary and past social justice movements in under documented student populations. STAND advocates for collections by collaborating with educators to provide pedagogical support, create digital resources, hosts workshops and forums for students, information professionals, academics, technologists, humanists, etc. interested in building communities with student organizers and their allies, leading to sustainable relationships, and inclusive physical and digital spaces of accountability, diversity, and equity. 

Hughes-Watkins is also the architect of the reparative archive framework, mentioned in her article, "Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices." She has launched workshops that focus on this archival praxis, which centers on community building as a first step. Her research areas focus on outreach to marginalized communities, documenting student activism within disenfranchised student populations, and utilizing narratives of vulnerable populations within the curricula of post-secondary education spaces. Hughes-Watkins is also the University Archivist at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, and is the Co-PI for the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American and African Studies grant at UMD. She is a 2019 Mover and Shaker and a 2019 ARL Leadership and Career Development Program fellow. Hughes-Watkins also serves on the Advisory Board for the Archives Leadership Institute.