ABSTRACT When a person requests records from a public archives in Sweden, the records must be assessed, and any information in them that may be detrimental for the person concerned shall be redacted before disclosure. This puts the assessing civil servants—in this study, archivists working at municipal and regional Swedish archives—in a position between the individual asking for information, and the state holding it. When requested records concern social care or health care, the assessments become part of the state’s interventions in the most private of spheres that exist: the family and the body. The assessing archivists often find themselves caught up in conflicts between the archive users’ rights to knowledge about their lives and other people’s right to privacy.
This dissertation focuses on these archivists as street-level bureaucrats. Their role is to put legislation into practice and make day-to-day decisions, often using a great deal of professional discretion. Starting from the position that (public sector) archives operate in the tension field between the individual and state power, the dissertation explores how different views on vulnerability, social care, privacy, and dignity affect the assessing, classifying, and disclosing of official records containing sensitive personal information. In the interviewed archivists’ reasoning on detriment assessment and disclosure, two ethical perspectives, the legalistic ethics and the feminist ethics of care, are brought to the fore. The aim of the present study is not to reach a conclusion about which ethical perspective is “right,” but to show how the feminist ethics of care clash with the established legalistic ethics.
The leeway that archivists have for professional discretion gives them power. The inherent paradox of power in the archives in combination with the intricate webs of relationships that are documented in care records, leave archivists stranded. Neither the legalistic ethics nor the feminist ethics of care are sufficient for providing guidance about decisions on disclosure. Whichever way the archivists turn, they are left with undesirable consequences and unsolvable problems. Thus trapped, the archivists in this study must walk a fine line between care and control, between the rule of law and inhumane bureaucracy.
Contact: ida.gronroos@abm.uu.se
Ida's public PhD defense will take place on February 14, at 10:15, Humanistiska teatern (22-0008). Faculty examiner: Professor Elizabeth Shepherd, Professor University College London.
