Amplifying the voices of those fighting against long histories of patriarchal dominance, the South Asian Gender and Sexuality Web Archive documents and preserves the work of activists, grassroots organizations, and social justice movements committed to promoting the visibility and experiences of LGBTQAI+ people and women in South Asia and its diasporas. With an emphasis on the websites of non-governmental organizations, and on the resources generated by social justice activist groups and individuals, the Archive demonstrates how organizations approach goals of advocacy, education, and capacity building related to issues of gender and sexuality across South Asian regions. 

An additional focus on resources that showcase the voices of LGBTQAI+ people and women — as revealed in expressions such as oral narratives, writings, performance, and the arts — provides insight into the struggles and resilience of the marginalized, offering content that is largely unavailable or preserved elsewhere and which is likely to disappear. Under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, and curated by Laura Ring (University of Chicago), Jef Pierce (University of Pennsylvania), Aruna Magier (New York University), and Richard Lesage (Harvard University), the Archive foregrounds the lives of South Asian LGBTQAI+ peoples and South Asian women around the world, and chronicles their movements against gender and sexuality based violence and discrimination.

Web archives preserve vulnerable information that may disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time. The IPLC’s Web Resources Collection Program is a collaborative development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research at participating libraries and beyond.

To learn more about the IPLC and its archives, visit its website here.

Written by: Samantha Abrams, Columbia University Libraries

Media contact: Barbara Valenza, Director of Library Communications