Jayme Collins is a scholar, writer, and audio producer. She studies poetry, land use, climate change, and archives. She tells stories about communities and cultures navigating environmental change.
Jayme is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University where she is a project leader at Blue Lab. She has a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University.
WRITING
Book Project:
“Composing in the Field”
Academic
Public and Catalogue
Reviews
AUDIO
Archival Ecologies
TEACHING
Princeton
Northwestern
EVENTS
Pop-up Story Patch
Ephemera Institute
EXPERIMENTS
Coracle
Tinkering
Things I see
Archival Ecologies
Produced with Blue Lab at Princeton University. You can find Archival Ecologies: Season 1 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and iHeartRadio. Season 2 forthcoming in 2025.
Archival Ecologies is an audio story series created and produced by Jayme Collins as a companion to a book project. The series investigates how ecological events and natural disasters are affecting cultural collections and the artifacts and memories they preserve for diverse communities. As climate change leads to more extreme weather events, the interactions between archives and the environments where they reside are becoming more frequent and more fraught. Beset by floods, fires, mold blooms and other ecologies, the objects and documents that communities preserve are sometimes lost or damaged.
This series tells the stories of such archives, their stewards and their significance for communities at the forefront of climate change. What do objects and collections mean in the communities that steward them, and what does recovery from loss look like? How do cultural stories continue or change in the absence of objects and collections? Archival Ecologies will address these questions by exploring the ecological lives of cultural collections in states of disruption, documenting collections in crisis and researching their connections to geographies and histories. Each season will take listeners to a new environment to share community experiences of why archives matter, what their loss means and what recovery might look like.
Credits
Created and hosted by Jayme Collins with research, writing and production support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath and Molly Taylor. Music by Hamilton Poe. Sincere thanks to Kouvenda Media for their partnership on this project. A production of Blue Lab with support from Princeton University. Copyright 2023 Jayme Collins and Blue Lab.
Season 1
During the 2021 summer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the historic town of Lytton, BC and nearby First Nations reserves suffered a catastrophic wildfire that took local archives, museums and cultural collections with it. In this first season of Archival Ecologies, we tell the stories of those collections and the communities who have stewarded them. Through the voices of those cultural stewards and knowledge keepers and the objects that have been lost (or salvaged), we’ll explore the interwoven histories and geographies of the region and the larger intersections between climate change, cultural preservation and recovery.
Episode 1: In the Burn Zone
Two years after a devastating 2021 wildfire burned through much of their village center, community members gather in Lytton, British Columbia for a prayer walk. Big questions inspire and inflect the event: How can the community rebuild? And what will the new community look like? Lytton community members weigh in on preserving their multicultural histories and recovering community identity when the artifacts and cultural collections that represented them are gone.
Episode 2: Salvage
In the wake of the fire, concerns about contamination slow down efforts to salvage material from the burn site. The BC Heritage Emergency Response Network aids Lytton’s organizations—especially the Lytton Chinese History Museum, founded by Lorna Fandrich—to access and recover material from the sites. Most of Lorna’s collection burned, but she was able to recover about 200 objects that will provide the foundation for the new museum. With a combination of salvaged and newly acquired objects, Lorna plans to rebuild the Lytton Chinese History Museum to tell the same story: the history of Chinese life in the Fraser Canyon region.
Episode 3: The Place of Objects
Nlaka’pamux knowledge keeper John Haugen describes baskets the Lytton First Nation Community lost during the 2021 wildfire and discusses the role of basketry in the community. The meaning and the making of baskets in the community draws together food systems, local ecological knowledge, colonial land and resource use disruptions, and the circulation of baskets and other First Nations cultural material during colonization, when baskets circulated as economic goods and as cultural artifacts destined for museums across the globe. For John, the recovery of baskets in the community hinges on the repatriation of baskets and on the creation of a local community center for showing baskets and teaching basket making knowledge, fostering a new generation of basket makers in the community.
Episode 4: Weaving Community Knowledge: Nlaka’pamux Basketmaking
Nlaka’pamux basket makers Judy Hanna and Peter Sam recount their processes of basket making, how they learned the craft, and share their hopes for the continuation of basketry traditions in their community.
Episode 5: Enchanted Objects
Richard Forrest, steward of the Lytton Museum and Archives, reflects on the devastating losses sustained by the municipal repository. With a collection predominantly composed of paper photographs, ledgers, and other documents, very little survived the fire at the Lytton Museum and Archives. For Richard, the importance of these materials lay in their ability to tell stories about daily life in the area across centuries. In the wake of the losses, Richard contemplates the futures of collections in digitized records and photographs, and 3-D printed copies of objects.
Episode 6: Curating Futures
For the communities in and around Lytton, charting a path to recovery requires navigating multiple stories about the meaning of the fire and the future of the town. While politicians and media alike were quick to cast the event as a climate change event, for locals this story carried implications that delayed rebuilding and raised costs. By contrast, longstanding approaches to adaptation and self-definition in the community, exemplified in a collection of Anglican commemorative plates curated by community members, provide different ways to imagine and create a future together from the region’s histories. Lytton’s cultural collections and the stories people tell about them can provide a basis for the process of imagining Lytton’s future amidst the myriad strands of its past. Collecting cultural objects and telling stories becomes a lens for transforming how recovery takes place, and for amplifying local frameworks and community priorities for imagining their own futures in the wake of disruption.
Season 2
Season 2 turns from fire to ice, telling stories gathered from climate scientists working in ice archives, from archaeologists rushing to conserve ancient artifacts revealed by melting ice, organizations looking to embed and store cultural artifacts in permafrost, and the communities who live alongside ice and its archives.