t.r.a.p.
methodology
Image above: working with Ballethnic Dance Company's archival materials.
Featuring Spelman College Students: Kennedy Dunning, Chloe Carton, and Kaniah Pearson
T.R.A.P. meets communities and artists where they are. There is no single map for preservation — only the terrain of each community's particular memory, its particular losses, its particular desires. What T.R.A.P. offers is not a formula but a practice: one that is intuitive, sustainable, and rooted in relationship.
T.R.A.P.'s methodology is rooted in what we call Radical Archivy — a practice of preservation that begins with a political commitment: that the memory of Black communities, artists, and cultural workers deserves to be tended with the same rigor, imagination, and care that institutions reserve for those they have historically deemed worth remembering.
Radical Archivy asks who gets to be an archivist, who gets to be an archive, and who gets to decide. It draws from the Black Radical Tradition — from Cedric Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and the long lineage of thinkers who understood that cultural memory is not incidental to liberation; it is inseparable from it.
To give this practice its shape, T.R.A.P. works from a gardening framework. Where conventional archival language speaks of collection, storage, and retrieval, T.R.A.P. speaks of tending, harvesting, and cultivating. This is not merely metaphor. It is a claim about what preservation actually requires: presence, patience, relationship, and return. A garden is not built once and left. It asks you to come back — season after season — and to be changed by what grows.
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The methods below are the practices through which T.R.A.P. does this work.
Seed Circles
(Workshops)
Knowledge about archiving should not live only inside institutions. T.R.A.P. hosts workshops that bring together archivists, memory workers, students, and anyone who has ever wondered what happens to the things we make and the lives we live. The Rooted in Memory Workshop Series is T.R.A.P.'s ongoing, global, open-to-the-public gathering space — a place to learn, share, ask hard questions, and build a collective literacy around preservation. These circles exist to demystify the archive and return it to the people it belongs to.
Harvest
(Oral Histories & Interviews)
Stories are not waiting to be discovered — they are alive in people. T.R.A.P. conducts oral histories and interviews with community members, artists, and cultural workers as a primary form of archival documentation. To harvest is to gather what has already grown: to listen with care, to hold what is offered, and to ensure that living memory finds a form that can be passed on.
Pollination
(Presenting & Publishing)
Preservation without circulation is storage. T.R.A.P. shares its work broadly — through blogging, curated exhibitions, conference presentations, and podcasting — so that the ideas, collections, and communities at the center of this work can cross-pollinate with other thinkers, makers, and memory workers. Knowledge grows when it travels.
Root Networks
(Resource Sharing)
Preservation without circulation is storage. T.R.A.P. shares its work broadly — through blogging, curated exhibitions, conference presentations, and podcasting — so that the ideas, collections, and communities at the center of this work can cross-pollinate with other thinkers, makers, and memory workers. Knowledge grows when it travels.
Tending
(Immersion)
Preservation happens through presence. T.R.A.P. becomes part of the communities it works with — attending rehearsals, showing up to events, learning the names and histories and relationships that give materials their meaning. This kind of immersion is not observation from a distance. It is tending: the slow, consistent, embodied work of being there. It also produces richer, more accurate description of archival materials, because the archivist understands what they are holding.
Grafting
(Institutional Liaison)
Institutional archives hold resources that communities need — and communities hold materials that institutions often fail to reach. T.R.A.P. acts as a bridge between the two: translating institutional language, demystifying the donation and acquisition process, and helping individuals and organizations make informed, empowered decisions about their records. Grafting is the practice of joining two root systems so that both become stronger.
Grafting
(Institutional Liaison)
Institutional archives hold resources that communities need — and communities hold materials that institutions often fail to reach. T.R.A.P. acts as a bridge between the two: translating institutional language, demystifying the donation and acquisition process, and helping individuals and organizations make informed, empowered decisions about their records. Grafting is the practice of joining two root systems so that both become stronger.
Propagation
(Teaching)
Every encounter is an opportunity to pass something on. T.R.A.P. integrates archival education into its work at every level — with students, collaborators, and community members — so that the knowledge of how to preserve does not remain concentrated in a few hands. Propagation means multiplying: taking what has been cultivated and helping it take root somewhere new.