Faculty of Information alumna Moska Rokay has been awarded the Dodds Prize for 2020 for her article “Ethnography as an Archival Tool: A Case Study of the Afghan-Canadian Diaspora.” Her article is based on a master’s thesis she carried out under the supervision of Professor T.L. Cowan. Rokay, who graduated in 2019, is currently working on the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA) as a Digital Humanities Research Fellow for the Institute of Islamic Studies at UofT.
Instituted in 2011, the Dodds Prize recognizes superior research and writing on an archival topic by a student enrolled in a Master’s level archival studies program at a Canadian university. The award honours Gordon Dodds (1941–2010), first President of the ACA, and Archivaria’s longest-serving general editor. Submissions received for the 2019–20 academic year were reviewed by adjudication committee members Jennifer Douglas, Rebecka Sheffield and Richard Dancy. Rokay’s article will be published in the Spring 2021 issue of Archivaria and the award will be formally presented at the 2021 ACA Award Ceremony. The citation reads:
In her article, Rokay discusses timely and important topics relating to community-based archives, and invites us to reflect on issues of community representation and under-representation. She persuasively argues for the use of critical ethnography as a method that would enable archivists to achieve collaborative representations of diverse, minority communities, and positions community self-archiving as potentially the best way for diasporic communities to represent their own experiences. This article makes a methodological contribution to archival theory and practice, and provides an engaging exploration of complex Afghan-Canadian identities.
