In rethinking the role of archives, food helps 

As a visual artist and a newly minted archivist, Lenora Huynh wants to challenge traditional archival theories while bringing to life the voices of the marginalized.  One of the ways the Master of Information graduate is doing this is by putting her work in food studies to use and bringing food into the archives. 

“Food is just so universal. I felt like it was a way to bridge gaps within archival studies,” said Huynh, adding that food can provide a way to tell stories when more traditionally archived items such as photographs and documents are missing, as they often are for so many refugees.  

In the recently published Winter 2024 version of the iJournal, Huynh has a paper in which she considers “food hoarding as an act of informal archiving for displaced or marginalized communities.” The article is an example of what’s known as autoethnography, in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings. 

“The paper is about how my parents hoard food and why I see that as archiving memory and trauma from the Vietnam war,” says Huynh, adding that her parents, who came to Canada as “boat people,” have three fully stocked fridges, one each in the kitchen, basement and garage, as well as storage areas for non-perishable items and containers. “I wrote about how during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of immigrant families actually documented or shared online that they fared pretty well in terms of food and weren’t as concerned about shortages in the grocery stores because immigrant families tend to stockpile food.” 

Huynh also included images of her mother storing handmade Vietnamese mayonnaise for banh mi and documented how the family created hundreds of spring rolls for future consumption. Even though she describes her family as “very private,” Huynh, who did her undergraduate degree in fine arts at the University of Waterloo, has made art about her parents in the past and says they are used to the idea of having potentially vulnerable experiences documented. 

For Huynh, branching out into archives work from the fine arts has allowed her to move beyond “a narrower focus on self-identity” to explore other people’s histories as well as to spread knowledge about those histories. As a participant in the Toronto Academic Libraries Internship (TALINT) program, working under the supervision of OISE outreach librarian Desmond Wong, Huynh gained insights into how to reach marginalized communities both within the university and beyond. 

With this in mind, she applied for a Faculty of Information EDI fellowship, proposing to hold two workshops and an exhibition on zines, a form of DIY magazines. “I’d learned about how zines have been used by marginalized communities such as Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, 2SLGBTQIA+ or disabled communities,” says Huynh. “They often use zines as a way to have their voices heard because they challenge traditional methods of publication and allow them to find more creative ways to express themselves. Zines could be copied and disseminated very easily.”

Huynh put lessons learned from her TALINT outreach and assessment position into practice while organizing the zine activities and worked to create welcoming spaces for students to collaborate. Not only did student participants in the workshops create zines for the exhibit, but at the exhibit launch, which took place on the fifth floor of the Learning Hub, there was also a table for students to exchange ideas and create their own mini-zines, as a way to create a sense of community. 

Students could also take away and keep zine copies for themselves, which is not something that can be easily done with other types of media where there are often copyright issues or a hefty fees to buy souvenir copies. “Essentially, I wanted to create more access to information,” says Huynh. 

Post-graduation this June, Huynh will be continuing with her OISE internship as she looks for a fulltime job. She’s also planning on getting back to her personal artwork, which got put on hold while she was in grad school. “I have a lot of ideas that I want to explore surrounding food as a means to assert identity,” says Huynh. “I want to combine my knowledge of archival studies with art making because I see there’s a connection that could be made there now.”