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Chido Muchemwa Recieves SAA Award

Chido Muchemwa, a master’s student at the Texas iSchool, has received the Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA).

The award recognizes minority graduate students of African, Asian, Latino or Native American descent who, through scholastic achievement, manifest an interest in becoming professional archivists and active members of SAA.

Muchemwa’s iSchool classmate, Itza Carbajal, was also honored by SAA this summer. Carbajal received an ARL/SAA Mosaic Program Fellowship.

The fellowship promotes diversification of the archives and special collections professional workforce by providing financial support, work experience, mentoring, career placement assistance and leadership development to emerging professionals from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups.

In announcing Muchemwa’s award, SAA commended her dedication to ensuring that historically underrepresented communities are not only reflected in archives, but are the narrators of their stories. At her current internship at UT’s Harry Ransom Center, Muchemwa presented on “Blackness in the White Imagination” during Black History Month, highlighting depictions of African-American people and culture authored by white people and advocating for collections to feature black stories told by black people.

“Many communities have created their own community archives as a way to tell their stories,” Muchemwa told SAA. “Traditional institutions have much to learn from such community archives, and I have been investigating what we can learn about radically imagining new structures for our archives that are more inclusive.”