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The goal of Tallbear’s proposed collaboration is to bring together different voices interested in “resisting, regularing, or reconfiguring scientific research to serve Native American communities.” Instead of “giving back,” or to think of our research as reciprocal, Tallbear wishes to stand with the communities where she conducts research. Sharing goals and desires while being engaged in a critical conversation that produces new knowledge and insight is what Tallbear hopes for in this type of collaboration.

The power structures inherent in forms of knowledge production (thinking especially of colonial practices) is what both structures this form of collaboration, but what this form of collaboration is trying to work against. The structures of academic publishing, engagements, single authorship etc. are all part of the power structure that makes studying with a shift that needs to happen. Not speaking for a community you’re working with, but actually in concert with. This declaration shifts the power dynamics. 

The place I have chosen is coastal chennai. The very construction of different parts of an extended coastline as a place is my own conceptualization. This is also echoed by environmental activists who see the coast as a particular type of ecological place where sand dunes, sea-water and fresh water exist in relation to one another. In their campaigns they show an understanding of the coast as a connected ecological zone, although it has distinct features at different points of the shoreline. For fishers who live and fish in the Bay of Bengal, the coast is not uniform everywhere.

This analytic does not map directly to M. Azzara's essay but in addressing the questions I will reflect on her "Description" and images #1 (Archive Toxics 3) and #2 (Archive Toxics).What is striking about the visualization #1 is the presentation of surfeit—all these cataloged containers of preservation that assure viewers our past is well-tended. M. Azzara's visualization calls attention to the absences of documentation of the lives of Black pioneers in early Los Angeles history. Her work examines these absences as a form of toxics.Image #2 is M.

The caption for Image #2 is fully realized.The caption for Image #1 is brief and direct.  It is dependent on the larger essay for full meaning. The caption raises questions for me. It presents the image as a starting point, an invitation to an archive. When I look at the image, I see florescent lighting, long, dark narrow aisles and an excess of boxes--closed, sorted, infused with meaning--to be investigated. Perhaps, for an archivist this is an idyllic place, but I sense a toxic environment present in this image.

Image #1 is a found image. It is centered and its perspective provides a sense of depth and excess, discipline and power. I think it is a terrific starting point to discussing absence.Image #2: Is a created image, a composite and editing of two photos into one. I am uncertain if it successfully conveys what the author is intending. When I look at this image I question the scale and placement of Biddy Mason's portrait within the frame. Not that Biddy Mason should not be front and center, but I do not know how presence impacts my reading of the other photo.

No. Neither for Image #1 or Image #2. I find both these images thought-provoking and challenging. They are unsettling in the best critical sense. 

The characterization of historical absences and silences as toxics archives is provocative. I especially appreciate how the author uses imagined visualizations as a challenge to toxicity.As an undergraduate I studied with Carlo Ginzburg whose work also examined silences in the archive and developed microhistory as a critical response (The Cheese and the Worms is one example).The author's imaginative visualizations address our understanding of the past through creative, critical practice. Her work challenges and extends my understanding of toxic spaces.

These visualizations are powerful in that they demonstrate how toxicity is not solely about chemicals, pollution, etcetera, but is a condition produced by social mechanisms of marking space (both literal and conceptual) in an oppressive fashion.  

I would to see elaborations in the captions of all three images, albeit in different ways. Images 1 and 2: what are the places? What are their histories? Where did you find them in the archive? (Same goes for the images of Biddy Mason, which seem to be different photographs of her.) Image 3: where is this archive? What is your relationship with it?