South Asian Canadian Digital Archive:: Fostering Knowledge Diversity and Equity Through Multilingual Knowledge Infrastructures

Abstract

Knowledge and its production is informed by the availability of and access to existing knowledge infrastructures. Historically, both the production of knowledge and knowledge infrastructures have been dominated and dictated by western1 schools of thoughts that elided, erased, neglected, and negated the existence of multiple epistemologies. This paper explores ways to understand the depth and breadth of global colonial legacies and epistemic coloniality—and locate the pathways out in the archives. Using South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (https://sacda.ca) as a case study, the paper questions ways to rethink, redefine, and refine the methodologies of traditional archives to enable spaces for open and inclusive scholarship. It further frames SACDA (1897 to present) as an open tool for building multilingual knowledge infrastructures and to bring the larger community into the process of collective knowledge mobilization, creation, and dissemination.