The concept of wicked problems can be used as a frame for enriching archivists' understanding of the societal challenges they are confronting in their work. This article explores the core tenets and intellectual history of the concept, looking at the origins of the term; its uses in design, planning, and various policy domains; and recent critiques of the concept. Using examples of archival engagements with the challenges of policing in underserved communities, refugees, child welfare, and climate change, this article examines the role of records and recordkeeping systems in wicked problems and how archivists have used community engagement as a core tenet of how to approach these societal challenges. These engagements also illustrate how grappling with wicked problems can change the practices, theories, and self-awareness of the profession itself.

When the history of the archival profession in the early twenty-first century is written, it will require a chapter on the willingness of the profession to fully engage in societal challenges. From climate change, to the plight of refugees, to an array of social injustices, over the past two decades, many archivists have engaged deeply with some of the world's most vexing challenges. This need to document and help redress societal ills and inequities is not entirely new, of course. It builds on several efforts and a literature stretching back to at least the 1970s, perhaps most notably to historian Howard Zinn's and archivist Gerald Ham's calls for archivists not just to document the powerful, but to make a conscious effort to document disadvantaged communities and individuals.1 Additionally, these efforts to engage and document societal challenges were often framed in postmodern concepts that have deeply influenced archival theory since the 1990s. The inclination of many archivists to directly engage in societal challenges grew remarkably in the 2010s. Several archival projects started in the past decade investigate the roles that archivists and recordkeeping can play in helping to address deep challenges, such as child welfare and refugee crises. Efforts have also been made to look at societal grand challenges holistically and understand the role that archival theory and practice can play in confronting them.2

Gaining a better understanding of the nature of the challenges that the profession is engaging would be profitable at this juncture. One of the ways to understand these challenges is through the concept of wicked problems, a term of art developed in the 1960s and 1970s that became a core concept of design in the 1980s and has been adopted in a variety of policy fields, particularly since the 2000s. Archivists have also begun to directly employ this concept over the past decade. A better understanding of the concept of wicked problems enriches our sense of the nature and complexity of the most pressing and difficult problems archivists are confronting as we enter the 2020s.

In this article, I review the core tenets and intellectual history of the concept of wicked problems. I examine the origins of the term; its uses in design, planning, and various policy domains; and recent critiques of the concept. In turn, I review the use of the concept in the archival field to characterize challenges faced by the profession. Using examples of archival engagements with the challenges of policing in underserved communities, refugees, child welfare, and climate change, I examine the role of records and recordkeeping systems in wicked problems and how archivists have used community engagement as a core tenet of how to approach these societal challenges. These engagements also illustrate how grappling with wicked problems can change the practices, theories, and self-awareness of the profession itself.

Origins

Design theorist Horst Rittel coined the term “wicked problems” in a series of lectures, talks, and articles he wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his landmark 1973 article, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” coauthored with urban designer Melvin Webber, Rittel describes the concept of wicked problems in a set of ten characteristics.3 Rittel and Webber define “wicked problems” as societal problems that are complex, vitally important, and ill-defined and that “rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution.”4 Rittel began describing wicked problems in seminars and classes in the 1960s at the University of California, Berkeley. The term seems to have been first published in a short 1967 article by systems scientist and Berkeley colleague C. West Churchman, who hosted a seminar series where Rittel described his ideas for wicked problems.5 Churchman recounted Rittel's description of wicked problems as “that class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decisions makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.”6 Rittel continued to develop his ideas for wicked problems and their role in design in a 1971 article about design education where he characterized design problems as “ill-behaved.”7 In 1972, Rittel and a colleague noted that information systems are often deployed to address wicked problems, which they described as having six properties.8 Rittel expanded on his description of wicked problems with a 1972 article in a Scandinavian economics journal.9 His 1973 “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” article, however, has become the commonly cited paper that articulates the concept and characteristics of wicked problems. In particular, people frequently reference Rittel and Webber's ten characteristics of wicked problems to demonstrate how a particular challenge, such as climate change, is a wicked problem.

Rittel and Webber discuss the nature of wicked problems, examine the inherent challenges that come with addressing these problems, and make a morality claim about the responsibilities that come with engaging these challenges. The two theorists describe wicked problems as a class of problems that present broad, systemic, and significant challenges to society, such as poverty. They contend that no clear boundaries to wicked problems exist. (“Wicked problems have no stopping rule.”)10 They claim that these problems do not fit neatly into distinct categories and have complex relationships with other problems. (“Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.”)11 Additionally, they note that wicked problems manifest themselves differently in every community. (“Every wicked problem is essentially unique.”)12

Rittel and Webber's core contention in discussing how people and communities address wicked problems is that even the act of defining these problems is a politically contested challenge. (“There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.”)13 One's description of a wicked problem, the two note, is driven by one's perspective. Thus, even the description of a wicked problem is a negotiation between groups with variant perspectives and goals. In addition, the description of a wicked problem goes hand-in-hand with suggesting solutions. (“The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.”)14 Describing an addiction crisis as a problem of either moral failing, disappearing economic opportunity, or corrupt medical practices suggests remedies for addressing the problem. In another article, Rittel notes that “every formulation of the WP [wicked problem] corresponds to a statement of the solution” and vice versa.15 Rittel's formulation of wicked problems suggests that problem formulation and solution development are intertwined, iterative activities that have no clear start and no clear end.

Rittel and Webber also make a morality claim directed at the fields of design, urban planning, and social policy. Implementing plans to address a wicked problem are often expensive undertakings that have significant—and sometimes unintended—effects on people's lives. (“Every attempt counts significantly.”)16 Nor are engagements in wicked problems academic exercises. What matters is not developing “correct” solutions, but rather developing solutions with good outcomes for people and communities. (“Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.”)17 The planners or others who are positioned as experts have a moral responsibility to the communities they engage, claim Rittel and Webber, because those communities have to live with the experts' designs and solutions. (“The planner has no right to be wrong.”)18

Rittel developed the concept of wicked problems as a critique of the promise and then emerging disappointment in the ability of systems analysis, scientific reasoning, and purely rational planning to solve societal problems.19 Designers and planners, Rittel contends, rely too heavily on natural science and engineering methodologies and systems design approaches to solve social problems.20 Rittel and Webber claim that “the social professions were misled somewhere along the line into assuming they could be applied scientists.”21 Rittel saw this confidence firsthand. His Berkeley colleague Churchman, who hosted the seminar where Rittel first proposed the notion of wicked problems, was working on a grant from NASA to examine how knowledge and technology developed in the space program could be brought to bear on the challenges facing American cities in the 1960s. Rittel's formulation of wicked problems can be read as a rebuttal to what he perceived as a pervasive overconfidence that emerged in mid-twentieth-century America in the ability of technical and scientific expertise to solve any type of problem.22

Articulating societal challenges as wicked problems was part of Rittel's call for a second generation of design that frames the discipline as primarily a political activity of collaboration, argumentation, iteration, and distributed expertise.23 This approach contrasts with what Rittel calls first-generation design, which he characterizes as an attempt to see design as a scientific endeavor in which expertise is held exclusively by the designer and design processes have distinct “problem definition and problem solution” phases.24 The type of challenges designers and planners face, contends Rittel, are wicked problems, which require a second-generation approach that depends less on scientific knowledge and more on political artfulness.25 Rittel claims that the persistence of societal challenges is not due to planners and designers lacking technical skills but to the nature of the problems themselves.26 Designers and planners, implies Rittel, need to be better politicians, sociologists, and mediators more than they need to be better scientists and engineers.

Rittel did not produce his work in a vacuum, as people in design and allied fields were writing about ill-defined and contested problems in the 1960s and 1970s using similar concepts as part of a broad effort to wrestle with challenges that bedeviled planners, government officials, engineers, community leaders, and academics during the mid-twentieth century.27 Rittel was engaged in a larger discussion about the role, nature, and maturation of the planning and design fields as people tried to reckon with an increasing resistance to notions of expertise being held by a small professional class.28 During the 1960s and 1970s, a number of scholars and leading thinkers developed other conceptual frameworks to model the challenges faced by society. For example, political scientist and economist Herbert Simon discussed the concept of ill-structured problems.29 Organization and systems theorist Russell Ackoff formulated the closely related concept of messes, which he defined as a “system of external conditions that produces dissatisfaction.”30 Organizational theorist Ian Mitroff and his colleagues provided early examples of using the concepts of wicked problems, ill-structured problems, and messes during the 1970s and 1980s, and discussed wicked problems in the context of management information systems, enumerating six characteristics of the concept.31

People in design and related fields continued to redescribe the characteristics of wicked problems and develop related concepts. In 1988, for example, urban planning scholar Donald Schön used the metaphor of a swamp to characterize “the problems of greatest human concern.”32 Systems scholar Jake Chapman and colleagues used the term “wicked issues,” which they gave four characteristics.33 Collaborative technology consultant Jeff Conklin consolidated Rittel's ten characteristics of wicked problems down to six.34 A 2007 report by the Australian Public Service Commission outlined wicked problems as a set of eight key features.35 Philosophy of science scholar Bryan Norton grouped wicked problems into four aspects.36 Four environmental policy scholars collaborated to describe climate change as a super-wicked problem with four additional characteristics of wickedness: time is running out, those seeking to end the problem are also causing it, no central authority, and policies discount the future irrationally.37

Uses

Wicked problems emerged as a core concept in the development of design as a discipline during the 1980s and 1990s, and, by the early 2000s, broad consensus agreed that design problems are wicked problems.38 Industrial design practitioner and scholar Nigel Cross and design theorist Richard Buchanan played key roles in establishing that consensus. In a 1982 article on the emergence of design thinking, Cross claimed that design problems are wicked problems and placed wicked problems squarely at the center of design.39 Buchanan reinforced the centrality of wicked problems in design in an influential 1992 article.40 The work of design, Cross and Buchanan claimed, was to address wicked problems.

Scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers in a wide range of domains have used and adapted the concept of wicked problems to grapple with societal challenges, particularly since the 2000s. Challenges framed as wicked problems include child welfare,41 housing,42 health care,43 cyber security,44 corruption,45 land use and natural resource management,46 Aboriginal land rights,47 environmental justice,48 economic gender inequality,49 and the opioid crisis.50 Not surprisingly, many researchers categorize climate change, particularly the political efforts to slow climate change and mitigate its effects, as a wicked problem.51

Scholars and practitioners who describe a challenge as a wicked problem often draw on a wide range of frameworks, methods, and techniques as tools for approaching and managing the problem.52 Examples of these approaches include collaborative strategies,53 critical action learning,54 general morphology analysis,55 participatory policy analysis,56 problem structuring,57 interactive governance theory,58 dialogue mapping,59 and feminist pragmatist methodology.60 Other frameworks for confronting wicked problems include a concept known as soft systems that focuses on systematic enquiry to navigate through constituencies with divergent goals and outlooks.61 Additionally, people highlight the role of leadership in addressing wicked problems62 and the importance of addressing the emotional, moral, psychological, and cultural dimensions of wicked problems.63 In 2016, four scholars published a survey of strategies for addressing wicked problems, mapping those strategies in a recast frame of six wicked problem characteristics.64

Because wicked problems are not just complex, but also large and systemic and have poorly defined boundaries that make it difficult to articulate where one problem stops and another begins, these societal challenges transcend the scope of any single profession. Many works point out the necessity of not just coalition building, but also the importance of bringing a diversity of expertise and knowledge to these challenges. People point to the important role of mixed methods research65 and interdisciplinary research66 in addressing wicked problems. Others propose the concepts of transdisciplinary imagination,67 collaborative rationality,68 networked approaches,69 and collaboration across levels of government.70 Public policy expert Anne Khademian and political scientist Edward Weber articulate the importance of networks and knowledge sharing across disciplines in addressing wicked problems, in part because these challenges invariably cut across the knowledge bases of multiple domains, constituencies, and interest groups.71 Others, however, note the limits of networking and collaboration methodologies and warn that people can overestimate the power of these approaches to address societal challenges.72

Another method that several government agencies, NGOs, and philanthropic organizations use is to narrow aspects of wicked problems into definable grand challenges and then rally research and engagement around those challenges. “Horizon 2020,” a European Union research and innovation program, identified six challenge areas to “bring together resources and knowledge across different fields, technologies and disciplines, including social sciences and the humanities.”73 In an example of articulating grand challenges to shape future research in library and information science, MIT hosted a 2018 workshop of experts who produced a report describing a set of grand challenges, recommendations, and research questions concerning scholarly communications and information science.74 The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation used the concept of grand challenges to organize and articulate its global health initiatives. As it launched the “Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative” in 2003, the Gates Foundation described grand challenges as “a call for a specific scientific or technological innovation that would remove a critical barrier to solving an important health problem in the developing world with a high likelihood of global impact and feasibility.”75 The foundation defined grand challenges in this manner to facilitate innovations to fairly well-understood problems with vexing roadblocks. Describing a grand challenge is defining a particular problem and establishing criteria for its successful resolution and then making a call to action (“I challenge you to solve this problem”) with the aim of directing resources and attention to that problem.

Criticism and Limitations

Wicked problems as an idea, and particularly Rittel's articulation of the concept, is not without criticism. A number of scholars voice concern that the concept has gained such currency that the term is being overused to the point of becoming meaningless.76 Not only can “wicked problems” be a meaningless term if not thoughtfully applied, the concept can trap people into thinking about problems in an apocalyptic, totalizing, and hopeless manner where success is never achieved, making it more difficult for communities to find workable solutions that can achieve at least some improvements.77 The term can also cause people to think about problems in abstractions that obscure the day-to-day lived realities of institutions and communities where wicked problems are actually manifested and remedies are actually applied.78

One of the most significant critiques of Rittel's work is of his binary presentation of wicked versus tame problems, where problems are either wicked or they are not. This initial articulation of the concept has led to an unhelpful framing of wicked problems as a distinct class of problems.79 In the past decade, many scholars have contended that thinking of all problems as having degrees of wickedness is more accurate and helpful.80 Some authors describe problems as being on a spectrum of wickedness.81 Few, if any, problems have all ten of the wicked characteristics that Rittel articulates.82 People also question Rittel's distinction that social problems are wicked and scientific problems are tame.83 Others question the influence the concept of wicked problems has actually had on public policy theory and practice and call for wicked problems to be more deeply integrated into cutting-edge policy analysis and theory.84 Additionally, political scientist Allan McConnell urges more consideration be given to the political forces that shape and constrain responses to wicked problems.85

The limits of the concept of wicked problems emerge from the history of its original articulation in the 1960s and 1970s. The concept, as formulated by Rittel, is primarily a critique of trusting the ability of science and engineering to solve social problems, as discussed earlier. Rittel's work problematizes societal challenges rather than putting forward an analytical framework for planning practices and policy analysis.86 As previously noted, many academics and practitioners find it necessary to bring in other frameworks and methodologies for addressing the challenge they identify as a wicked problem. The concept of wicked problems is a critique and a descriptor but does not substantively propose methods for addressing societal challenges.

Despite these critiques, the concept of wicked problems endures. This endurance emerges from Rittel's direct, forceful writing and his ability to elegantly crystalize a building frustration in the fields of design and policy into a memorable phrase.87 Urban policy scholars Moira Zellner and Scott D. Campbell note that the concept remains in wide use in part because of Rittel and Weber's “unequivocal writing” in their landmark article.88 Rittel's articulation of wicked problems played a key role in reorienting the conceptualization of societal challenges as not just very complex problems, but also as open-ended challenges that make even just defining the problem an elusive and politically contested act.89

The recent critiques of wicked problems along with a better awareness of its historical origins make the concept more, not less, useful. By understanding its limits and the context in which it was originally articulated, the concept can be more thoughtfully and productively employed. The time has come to move beyond just saying “issue x is a wicked problem” to a place where the subtle contours of a problem can be carefully understood. Only through studying and articulating these subtleties can programmatic responses be developed to help address these problems. Thoughtfully using the concept of wicked problems also provides the language and grace to understand that not everyone will share the same articulation of a problem and that debating the nature of a societal challenge is a key part of addressing it.

Frameworks and Modeling

The concept of wicked problems also promotes an understanding that most significant problems are enduring and ever changing, and that they often morph into other challenges. These problems are therefore managed rather than solved and require a modest and realistic vision of what can be achieved in the face of such challenges.90 People usually hedge their descriptions of efforts to confront wicked problems with verbs like “manage,” “address,” “handle,” and “tame” rather than making absolute claims about solving these problems, indicating an “acceptance of wicked problems as a sustained social reality.”91 Thus, understanding and engaging wicked problems is a persistently iterative and reflexive practice.92 Scholars conceptualize approaches to wicked problems, such as clumsy solutions, that emphasize imperfect solutions and modest aims that enable some incremental progress.93 Policy scholar Catrien J. A. M. Termeer and a colleague suggest the concept of the small wins framework as a method for incrementally confronting wicked problems.94 Others suggest the value of piecemeal and incremental reforms that allow for adaptation and experimental learning.95 Regardless of the approaches used, solutions to wicked problems cannot, by definition, be perfect or final. An obligation remains, however, to formulate and apply solutions coherently and intelligently, no matter how modest their aims.96

Over the past twenty years, several scholars have built on the concept of wicked problems to develop additional frameworks to gain that subtler understanding of problems. For example, political scientists B. Guy Peters and Matthew Tarpey suggest using the ten characteristics of wicked problems as an initial checklist for a preliminary analysis of a problem.97 Public policy researcher Brian W. Head and colleagues encourage people to understand wickedness as just one kind of problem type.98 Head presents an analytical framework of looking at the wickedness of problems along three dimensions: complexity, uncertainty, and divergence.99 Water resource management expert Sabrina Kirschke and colleagues expand on Head's framework to present a model of wickedness and policy delivery with five dimensions: goals, variables, dynamics, interconnections, and informational uncertainty.100 Policy scholars Duco Bannink and Willem Trammel propose looking at wicked problems along the dimensions of conflict and factual complexity.101 Management scholar John Alford and Head contend that complex problems vary in the extent and type of wickedness and propose a typology of wicked problems that accounts for structural complexity, knowability, knowledge fragmentation, knowledge-framing, interest-differentiation, and power-distribution.102 Peters outlines seven characteristics of these types of problems.103 Policy scholar Wei-Ning Xiang along with Head frames wicked problems as having the characteristics of indeterminacy in problem formulation; nondefinitiveness in problem solution; nonsolubility; irreversible consequentiality; and individual uniqueness that in turn require adaptive, participatory, and transdisciplinary approaches.104 In another example of modeling a response framework to wicked problems, Termeer and colleagues identify four capabilities—reflexivity, resilience, responsiveness, and revitalization—that need to be brought to bear against wicked problems in three dimensions of response: acting, observing, and enabling.105 Termeer and her colleagues subsequently added a fifth capability, rescaling.106 Examining these and other models in detail is beyond the scope of this article; I mention them here to highlight the presence of the array of analytic frameworks and policy development methods available for analyzing and understanding societal problems that go beyond merely labeling them as wicked problems.

This section examines how members of the archival profession have applied and used the concept of wicked problems. First, this section reviews how the archival field has changed its theories and practices in the course of engaging a range of societal challenges. This includes looking at how archivists work with communities to engage in wicked problems and how these engagements have changed the archival profession. This section then looks at other archival engagements with wicked problems, in particular refugees and child welfare, and how archives, records, and recordkeeping play critical roles in addressing wicked problems. This is followed by a review of how archivists and others in allied fields explicitly use the concept of wicked problems to frame and describe challenges within their professions. Finally, this section looks at some of the emergent efforts to theorize archival engagement with wicked problems.

Professional Self-reflection and Change through Engaging Societal Challenges

Problems have wicked attributes in part because the regular practices of a community, profession, or organization cannot address them. A community, profession, or organization is never external to the wicked problem it confronts. Part of the wickedness of wicked problems is that the entities trying to manage a problem are often part of it. Thus, confronting wicked problems is not just an act of fighting an external force but is also an act of self-change. Head and Alford observed for example, that addressing wicked problems necessitates a transformative experience for government agencies that “calls for public officials to forge new ways of thinking, leading, managing, and organizing that recognize the complexity of the issues and processes.”107

The archival field has a long and rich tradition of engaging in societal challenges. A key element of those engagements has been reexamining, challenging, and changing archival theories and practices, so that archivists are ameliorating rather than exacerbating problems such as structural racism or climate change. The calls from Zinn and Ham in the 1970s to document disadvantaged communities and individuals were calls for archivists to examine and change their appraisal and collecting practices. Many archivists responded in the 1970s and 1980s with efforts to document immigrant and ethnic communities in the United States.108 Historian and librarian Dominique Daniel demonstrates how this effort to document these communities was part of a growing interest in social history and also part of the intellectual lineage that saw the emergence of postmodern thought in archival theory in the 1990s and continues through to the current literature on community archives.109 A prevailing concept in this intellectual lineage is to see the community as the central actor in community archives endeavors and not merely as a subject of an archives' collection policy.

These efforts to document communities have also led to a fundamental rethinking of the concept of archival custody. Archivist Joel Wurl calls on archivists to replace the framework of ownership with one of stewardship.110 Focusing on the role of records in Caribbean countries, archival scholar Jeannette Bastian explores the crucial role that archival custody plays in the challenges that many societies face in reckoning with—and moving forward from—their colonial legacies. Archivists, as noted by Bastian, need to have a much more nuanced and expansive understanding of custody to avoid perpetuating the negative effects of colonialism. This includes conceptualizing provenance more subtly, thinking of communities as record-creating entities, and foregrounding access in addressing questions of custody.111

The profession's reckoning with climate change is another example of people reexamining archival theory and practice while confronting a wicked problem. This work has included assessments of the threats that climate change poses to archives in the continental United States112 and Pacific Island nations,113 discussions of actions that archivists can take in the face of climate change,114 and an examination of how increasing the efficiency of recordkeeping technologies leads to the consumption of more—not fewer—archival resources.115 The focused work on climate change has increased dramatically within the past five years, as evidenced by the 2017 Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene colloquium, the thematic focus on climate change during the 2019 Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (ACRL/ALA) meeting, and a 2020 special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies (JCLIS), “Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene.”116 The field is not only discussing how to protect its holdings but is deeply reexamining its assumptions and beliefs in the face of this threat, reconsidering archives in the context of climate change in philosophical and existential terms.117 Part of this self-examination is looking critically at archives' own carbon footprint, particularly the energy-intensive digital preservation activities archivists undertake. Archivist Keith L. Pendergrass and colleagues claim that a paradigm shift in archival practice that includes more selective appraisal decisions, less intensive preservation activities that tolerate some loss, and more judicious availability of archival materials is needed for archives to successfully persist in the face of climate change.118 This framework aligns with archivist Ben Goldman's call for a “meaningful though difficult conversation about whether the survival of knowledge into the distant future will primarily depend on deliberately preserving less of it at a lower quality.”119

Professional change in the context of societal challenges and social injustices can be difficult experiences that force self-reckonings. The Society of American Archivists' grappling with and ultimately endorsing the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials illustrates that struggle.120 Developed in 2006 by the First Archivist Circle, a group concerned with developing best practices for culturally sensitive care of Native American materials held by non-tribal institutions, the Protocols prompted a long and extensive debate within the profession. SAA Council twice declined to endorse them before ultimately doing so in 2018. With that endorsement came an apology from Council and an acknowledgment that the debate was marred with “cultural insensitivity and white supremacy.”121

Addressing Wicked Problems through Community Engagement

Community archives provide numerous examples of archival engagement with wicked problems. Over the past twenty years, research on community archives has grown into a substantial body of literature with many areas of enquiry.122 The centrality of communities in community archives and the engagement that community archives frequently have in activist practices are critical areas of study that illuminate the nature of archival engagements with wicked problems.

Archival scholar Andrew Flinn and colleagues note that communities frequently create archives as part of political efforts to counter dominant narratives, protect and assert rights, redress wrongs, and help confront societal challenges.123 Flinn and heritage scholar Mary Stevens note that community organizations and archives “are not seen as alternatives to struggles but as part of them, a resource for continuing and renewing the fight.”124 Archival scholar Anne Gilliland contends that archives and effective recordkeeping are key resources “critical to the empowerment and profile development of grassroots identity- and issue-based, and activist communities.”125 Not only are archives key resources to social movements, they are social movements, as archival scholar Rebecka Taves Sheffield demonstrates in her account of how LGBTQ+ community archives help make queer history part of public history.126 Archival scholars Marika Cifor, Michelle Caswell, and colleagues conducted multiple studies to find strong evidence of archives playing the political roles of countering symbolic annihilation, providing places of belonging, and being situated as an essential element of community activism.127 Conversely, Caswell and archival scholar Ricardo Punzalan note that community archives are a key part of understanding archival intersections with social justice more broadly.128 These struggles to change narratives and improve the welfare of a community are usually involved in complex problems that are political in nature and have contested definitions. In other words, many of the challenges that community archives are engaged in can be understood as wicked problems. Thus, many archival engagements with wicked problems manifest themselves in community archives. Incorporating wicked problems concepts into community archives scholarship provides opportunities to enhance the analysis of the challenges that communities are trying to address and help to define the debates over how to characterize and address these problems.

A central tenet that has emerged in the professional literature and in practice is the importance of community members leading and controlling community archives and records. The profession's engagements with communities and community archives have not always worked well, and the extensive literature on community archives is due, in part, to mistakes and misunderstandings archival institutions have made with communities. However, the importance of community members leading discussions and efforts about how they are documented and how their collective memory is articulated and preserved is gaining broad acceptance in the archival field. For example, in her Voice, Identity, and Activism Framework, Gilliland notes, “the interests, needs, and well-being of the community are central” and calls for a community-centric framework for understanding community archives, imploring collecting institutions not to treat these archives as materials to be collected.129 This outlook mirrors the wide acceptance in the wicked problems literature that the experience and knowledge of communities most affected by wicked problems are essential for addressing these challenges. Rittel emphasizes that the expertise needed to manage a wicked problem is not concentrated in the hands of a small set of professionals and scholars, but “is usually distributed over many people,” particularly those most directly affected by the problem and any implemented solution.130 He notes, “nobody wants to be ‘planned at.'”131 Agreeing that nobody wants to be “archived at” serves archivists well in both maturing archival practice and theory and in engaging with wicked problems.

The Power to the People project illustrates the dimensions of community archives as a vehicle for addressing a wicked problem and archivists modifying their practices to center the concerns and role of community members. In this project, archivists worked with members of Puncture the Silence—Stop Mass Incarceration on an oral history initiative to document police violence from the perspective of Cleveland residents and create the People's Archive of Violence in Cleveland. As recounted by archival scholars Stacie Williams and Jarrett Drake, the archivists involved in the project took the key step of talking with community members first to understand what they wanted to accomplish before taking action.132 Technical archival expertise followed the lead of the community's aims and concerns. Archival documentation, for example, was purposely limited to protect the identities of interviewees. The Power to the People project embraces the ideas that expertise is distributed and that those who live with the wicked problem should play a leading role in shaping its remedies. This engagement also demonstrates the importance of self-reflective changes to archival practices, such as limiting documentation in the interest of privacy and safety and conceptualizing the locus of expertise as being with community members rather than archivists.133 The project also illustrates how a community creating an archive and documenting its experiences was part of its effort to define a wicked problem it faced and, in turn, to shape strategies for addressing that challenge.

Archival engagements with communities grappling with wicked problems are not limited to community archives. The University of California, Los Angeles, project On the Record, All the Time brought together stakeholders to grapple with a wicked problem that has a key recordkeeping component. The project investigated the challenges law enforcement agencies face in preserving audiovisual evidence in a trustworthy and sustainable manner. Looking specifically at body-worn police cameras, this project hosted a 2016 national forum of law enforcement agencies, legal and policy experts, vendors, activists, civil liberties groups, and archival scholars to “facilitate information exchange and radical collaboration with key stakeholders.”134 Bringing together this array of stakeholders allowed participants to gain “a more holistic perspective on the entire lifecycle of [body-worn camera] . . . records.”135 This project provides an example of archivists working as trusted partners to bring together multiple communities with divergent perspectives for a structured exchange of views to facilitate a more common understanding of a wicked problem—in this case, illuminating the full spectrum of challenges involved in preserving audiovisual evidence, a critical aspect of the wicked problem of policing in underserved communities.

Role of Records and Recordkeeping Systems in Wicked Problems

Beyond using the concept to identify, describe, and grapple with challenges of archival practice, archivists and archival scholars have also engaged in work and research on how recordkeeping and archival theory and practice can help address a wide range of societal wicked problems. Using the term “grand challenges” as a synonym of wicked problems, archival scholars Anne Gilliland, Sue McKemmish, and others have worked extensively over the past ten years to explore how archival and recordkeeping expertise can be brought to bear on these problems, the research infrastructure needed to support these engagements, and the role of recordkeeping in these challenges.136 Much of this work examining how “archival and recordkeeping imperatives, frameworks, processes, technologies and standards can contribute in significant ways to addressing many of society's most pressing grand challenges” has been carried out under the auspices of the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI), a consortium of archival doctoral programs and scholars.137 AERI working groups looked at how records play a role in grand challenges and how archival theory and scholarship can contribute to the efforts to address these challenges in the realms of transparency and accountability, environmental sustainability, human rights and social justice, and peace and security.138 These efforts built on an expanding scholarship at the intersection of archives, records, and record-keeping with politics, power, justice, and ethics.139 Archival projects engaging the challenges of refugees and child welfare provide detailed insight on the critical roles that records and recordkeeping systems play in both exacerbating and ameliorating wicked problems.

Out of research on the role of records and archives in protecting human rights and redressing violations,140 recent projects on the intersection of records and refugees have emerged. For example, the Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Initiative, based at the University of California, Los Angeles, supports a number of projects that examine the critical role that records, ICTs, and archives play or could play in the fate of forcibly displaced persons.141 The goal of the initiative “is to identify how humanitarian-centred recordkeeping interventions in the arenas of recordkeeping systems and practices, technologies, law and policy might assist refugees and their descendants across time and geographies.”142 One of the R3 projects used literary warrant analysis to examine how records and recordkeeping system can both protect and hinder the human and data rights of refugees, and, out of this analysis, the study produced a rubric of rights in records.143 Other research in this area notes that critical records for refugees, such as identity papers, birth records, and property deeds, depend on recordkeeping systems embedded in legal and political regimes that are often ruptured or not recognized by states where people seek refuge. Protecting refugees requires a creative and flexible approach to accepting a wide range of government and personal records as evidence of a person's rights and claims.144 Research in this area illuminates the central role of records and recordkeeping systems in the wicked problem of refugees, the multiple and contested claims of rights and interests embedded in records, and that records and recordkeeping systems exacerbate the challenges refugees face but are also essential to their safety.

Child welfare has been widely acknowledged to contain multiple wicked problems, including abuse at the hands of individuals and institutions, neglectful out-of-home care, and institutionalized kidnapping intertwined with racism. Archivists have become deeply involved in the work of redressing this set of wicked problems through multiple efforts. These include the Archives and the Rights of the Child program at Monash University, which supports several research projects looking at the role recordkeeping systems have played in harming children in Australian out-of-home care but also envisioning responsive, accountable, and child-centered systems;145 the MIRRA: Memory—Identity—Rights in Records—Access project based at University College London, which looks at the role of recordkeeping in out-of-home care in England;146 and other research.147 The Archives and the Rights of the Child program and the MIRRA project provide multifaceted examples of archivists deeply engaging in the work of addressing wicked problems. Both efforts highlight the centrality of records and recordkeeping systems in out-of-home care as both an important contributor to the harm inflicted on children and care leavers (adults who experienced out-of-home care as children) and also an important element in the effort to systemically redress these harms.148 The Archives and Rights of the Child program, which built on previous archival research projects and a series of Australian national inquiries about out-of-home care,149 has found that longstanding archival tenets such as singular provenance and narrow notions of who is a records creator led to recordkeeping systems that protected institutions at the expense of communities and the endangerment of individuals.150 The program has incorporated several concepts to help work through the challenges of this wicked problem, using the records continuum as the primary vehicle for imagining a recordkeeping infrastructure informed by the concept of records cocreation and shared provenance that supports and protects the interests, rights, and memories of children throughout their lives.151 These Australian projects are firmly rooted in transdisciplinary approaches spearheaded by the lived expertise of care leavers, placing those most affected by the wicked problem at the center of formulating solutions.152 The MIRRA project followed the same ethos, bringing together people with an array of academic, professional, and lived expertise as well as incorporating archival scholar Gregory Rolan's Participatory Recordkeeping Continuum Model.153

The Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Initiative, MIRRA, and Archives and the Rights of the Child illustrate the vital role that records and recordkeeping systems play in wicked problems, both as components of systemic ills that afflict communities and as tools for righting societal wrongs. Records and recordkeeping systems are not just one of many elements in the creation and redressing of wicked problems but are at the core of conceptualizing and understanding them. Because these types of problems span communities and time, a single individual, profession, or organization cannot directly observe the full scope of a wicked problem. These problems can only be conceptualized through multiple individuals, organizations, and communities describing them. This description iteratively builds on daily, lived experiences documented in the multiverse of recordkeeping practices among diverse stakeholders. Recordkeeping practices are therefore a fundamental element of the process of negotiating, shaping, and articulating the definition of a wicked problem and its corresponding solutions. In turn, understanding the complexities and biases of recordkeeping practices as well as how records are managed and understood through time and across communities are vital to understanding how wicked problems are articulated and confronted.

Using the Concept of Wicked Problems to Frame Archival Challenges

While the archival field has engaged in societal challenges for decades, only in the past ten years have people explicitly used the concept of wicked problems in archival literature and more broadly in library and information science to describe the challenges that face these fields.154 A February 2020 search of two library science databases for the term “wicked problems” returned results for fifty-four journal and periodical articles. Although this represents a relatively modest amount of literature, thirty-two of these articles were published since 2016, and forty-five since 2013, suggesting an emergent interest in the concept within the field. People, for example, characterize research data management as a wicked problem.155 Gregory Rolan uses wicked problems as a way to conceptualize the challenge of facilitating archival systems interoperability.156 In a 2012 master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, graduate student Yee May Chua proposed the “complex system records model” to explore the recordkeeping practices of organizations attempting to confront wicked problems.157 Across the LIS landscape, people have used design thinking and wicked problems together to inform library practice and information systems research.158 Additionally, wicked problems have been used as a rubric for LIS graduate education.159 Consortial cataloging of electronic theses and dissertations,160 endangered musical heritage,161 and researching e-book usage162 have all been described as wicked problems.

In the area of information policy, researchers use wicked problems as a theoretical framework to analyze governments' use of social media163 and to understand the depth of complexities that arise from implementing a national electronic health records system.164 Scholars also discuss the importance and challenges of visualizing data to illuminate wicked problems for diverse constituencies.165 The 2015 International Conference on Digital Government Research had the theme “Digital Government and Wicked Problems: Climate Change, Urbanization, and Inequality,” with selected papers published in 2016 thematic issues of Government Information Quarterly and Information Polity.166 These papers explore the tension between information and communications technologies “contribut[ing] to our sophisticated understanding of complex policy problems” but also “aggravat[ing] existing unsolvable problems.”167 Topics among these papers include the use of open data,168 the role of information flow in combating Ebola,169 and the influence of social media in political polarization.170

Archivists and records managers also bring other concepts to bear on challenges they characterize as wicked problems. For example, records management scholar Julie McLeod and information studies scholar Sue Childs characterize electronic records management as a wicked problem because it is extensively driven by an institution's context and shaped by the perspective of professionally divergent stakeholders, creating unique challenges defined by political interests within an organization.171 Childs and McLeod offer the Cynefin framework, a sense-making construct to help people “make sense of problems and situations, in different dynamic business contexts, and take appropriate action,” as a method for managing the challenges of electronic records.172

In an example of bringing these kinds of concepts to bear on applied LIS work, librarian Kara Long and colleagues conceptualize the management and description of electronic theses and dissertations as a wicked problem and adopt the political science concept of clumsy solutions to frame their descriptive standards approach to this challenge.173 This clumsy solution approach does not attempt to force consensus, but “incorporate[s] dissonance and disorder.”174 Seeing the description of electronic theses and dissertation as a wicked problem allowed the librarians managing the Texas Digital Library to leverage the clumsy solution concept to create a descriptive standard that “leaves room for reiterative decision making, recognizing bias, and acknowledging that the standard only manages the problem of description with the expectation of ongoing revision.”175

Theorizing Archival Engagements with Wicked Problems

The archival field is also beginning to take steps not just to identify challenges it is grappling with as wicked problems, but also to theorize the nature of the “wickedness” of these challenges. This conceptual work is still in its early stages with room for further development, particularly in leveraging policy frameworks to explore the role of records, recordkeeping systems, and archives in addressing these types of problems. Conceptualizing the archival multiverse and wrestling with its implications for archivists has been a foundational element of this work. Several archivists frame the archival multiverse as the archival profession's own internal wicked problem to articulate the fundamental challenge of engaging with divergent recordkeeping paradigms. Building on archival scholar Allison Krebs's introduction of the concept of the multiverse as a potential framework for enriching archival thought,176 a team of archivists conceptualized the term “archival multiverse” as “encompass[ing] the pluralism of evidentiary texts, memory-keeping practices and institutions, bureaucratic and personal motivations, community perspectives and needs, and cultural and legal constructs with which archival professionals and academics must be prepared, through graduate education, to engage.”177 The concept asks the archival community to fully wrestle with the challenges of documenting, describing, and working in a diverse and often divergent world with “multiple ways of knowing and practicing.”178 McKemmish, Rolan, and archival scholar Joanne Evans explicitly identify the archival multiverse as a core grand challenge for the field.179 The archival multiverse is a challenge for the archival field to confront, but is also a mode of thinking that enables archivists to navigate a recordkeeping world of “social and technological complexity and uncertainty.”180 It is a way for archivists to embrace, rather than suppress, multiplicity and complexity in their work.181 Evans notes that doing archival work in an “archival multiverse requires systemic solution-seeking, incorporating abilities to identify and handle multiplicities, contradictions, and contested ideas both in, and through, time and space.”182 Having a mindset that embraces the complexity of the archival multiverse and the messiness of wicked problems helps archivists work through these challenges.

The archival profession has long been engaged in the challenges of managing and engaging with multiple and often contradictory narratives, evidence, records, and recordkeeping systems. Building on the foundational theory of the records continuum and the archival multiverse—as well as other concepts such as multiple provenance—has deepened its engagement and comfort with these contradictions and multitudes. A key aspect of engaging with wicked problems is recognizing that divergent and conflicting viewpoints are an inherent part of these challenges. Wicked problems are wicked in part because their definitions are politically contested. Divergent conceptualizations of problems and their solutions follow from the divergent worldviews and preferences among an array of actors. Concepts such as the archival multiverse and models like the records continuum provide intellectual frameworks that lend themselves to grappling with political contradictions and divergent viewpoints and explicitly leveraging wicked problems concepts.

Archivists have a long lineage of engaging in societal challenges, and currently a broadening consensus exists within the field of the importance of archivists addressing these challenges.183 The field has also adopted postmodern and critical theories and frameworks to enrich archivists' understanding of the role that records, recordkeeping systems, and archives play in society. While a significant portion of the archival profession is engaged in societal challenges and has eloquently articulated the role of records and archives in those challenges, in most cases, archivists have not explicitly identified these challenges as wicked problems or have leveraged the wicked problems or policy literature. To extend the profession's influence on society's deepest challenges, archivists would profit from more fully engaging with wicked problems theory and policy analysis. Leveraging this literature would enable archivists to more systematically and richly analyze the societal challenges they are engaging and understand the limits of the solutions they propose. The Archives and the Rights of the Child program at Monash University provides a strong example of archivists engaging in a societal challenge, employing wicked problems concepts, influencing policy, and changing a community's experience. The archival field is also well positioned to more fully incorporate wicked problems concepts in its work because it has become adept at bringing in external theories and frameworks to deal with archival and societal challenges.184

More direct engagement in the wicked problems and policy literature would not just raise the profile of the archival profession but would also enrich that discourse. Records are an essential part of wicked problems but go virtually unmentioned in that literature. The archival field has valuable expertise on the contested nature of recordkeeping, which includes documenting and making sense of people, institutions, communities, and societies; reconciling diverse and often contradictory accounts of events and experiences; the relationship between records and evidence; and the nature of individual, institutional, community, and societal trust in records. This expertise is central to addressing societal challenges because information, evidence, knowledge, and trust play vital roles in conceptualizing, defining, and addressing wicked problems. Archival and recordkeeping expertise can and should enrich society's understanding of its deepest and most perplexing challenges.

This article explores the nature, history, and evolving uses of the concept of wicked problems to help contextualize and inform past, current, and future archival engagements in the daunting challenges that face society and the archival profession. A long lineage exists in the archival field of engaging with societal challenges, and archivists should continue to engage wicked problems with modest confidence. Archival theory and practice have valuable insights and knowledge to offer as recordkeeping, storytelling, memory, and knowledge management play key roles in understanding and grappling with wicked problems. Archivists have essential roles to play in confronting these challenges. These engagements are not easy, of course. Wicked problems test and push professional assumptions and expose shortcomings. These problems are persistent and resistant to resolution—archivists' contributions are often modest, and their benefits are normally slow to manifest. Those limits are not a reason to surrender to a sense of futility but are rather a call to persistently strive to make the archival profession and surrounding communities better today than yesterday and better tomorrow than today.

The author's affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for identification purposes only and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE's concurrence with, or support for, the positions, opinions, or viewpoints expressed by the author. Approved for public release. Distribution unlimited. Case Number 20-1598. Preliminary versions of this article were presented at the 2017 Society of American Archivists Research Forum and the 2018 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting.

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3

  1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.

  2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

  3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.

  4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.

  5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.

  6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.

  7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.

  8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.

  9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.

  10. The planner has no right to be wrong.

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Austin McCrea, “Can Administrative Capacity Address Wicked Problems? Evidence From the Frontlines of the American Opioid Crisis,” Administration & Society 52, no. 7 (2020): 983–1008, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095399719878727.

51

Ellen M. van Bueren, Erik-Hans Klijn, and Joop F. M. Koppenjan, “Dealing with Wicked Problems in Networks: Analyzing an Environmental Debate from a Network Perspective,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 13, no. 2 (2003): 193–212, https://doi.org/10.1093/jpart/mug017; Steve Rayner, “Wicked Problems: Clumsy Solutions—Diagnoses and Prescriptions for Environmental Ills” (Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global Environment, Sydney, Australia, July 2006); Richard J. Lazarus, “Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future,” Cornell Law Review 94, no. 5 (2009): 1153–1233, https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/159; Levin et al., “Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems”; Brian W. Head, “Evidence, Uncertainty, and Wicked Problems in Climate Change Decision Making in Australia,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 32 (2014): 663–79, https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fc1240; Cynthia H. Stahl, “Out of the Land of Oz: The Importance of Tackling Wicked Environmental Problems without Taming Them,” Environmental Systems Decisions 34 (2014): 473–77, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-014-9522-5; Catrien J. A. M. Termeer et al., “Coping with the Wicked Problem of Climate Adaptation across Scales: The Five R Governance Capabilities,” Landscape and Urban Planning 154 (October 2016): 11–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.01.007.

52

Jonathan Rosenhead, “What's the Problem? An Introduction to Problem Structuring Methods,” Interfaces 26, no. 6 (1996): 117–31, http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.26.6.117; Brian W. Head and John Alford, “Wicked Problems: Implications for Public Policy and Management,” Administration & Society 47, no. 6 (2015): 711–39, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095399713481601.

53

Nancy Roberts, “Wicked Problems and Network Approaches to Resolution,” International Public Management Review 1, no. 1 (2000); Nancy Roberts, “Coping with Wicked Problems: The Case of Afghanistan,” in Learning from International Public Management Reform, vol. 11B, Research in Public Policy Analysis and Management (Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd., 2001), 353–75.

54

Cheryl Brook et al., “On Stopping Doing Those Things That Are Not Getting Us to Where We Want to Be: Unlearning, Wicked Problems and Critical Action Learning,” Human Relations 69, no. 2 (2016): 369–89, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0018726715586243.

55

Tom Ritchey, Wicked Problems—Social Messes: Decision Support Modelling with Morphological Analysis (New York: Springer, 2011); Tom Ritchey, “Wicked Problems: Modelling Social Messes with Morphological Analysis,” Acta Morphologica Generalis 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–8.

56

Frank Fischer, “Citizen Participation and the Democratization of Policy Expertise: From Theoretical Inquiry to Practical Cases,” Policy Sciences 26 (1993): 165–87, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00999715.

57

Michael Pidd, “From Problem-Structuring to Implementation,” The Journal of the Operational Research Society 39, no. 2 (1988): 115–21, https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.1988.23.

58

Svein Jentoft and Ratana Chuenpagdee, “Fisheries and Coastal Governance as a Wicked Problem,” Marine Policy 33, no. 4 (2009): 553–60, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2008.12.002.

59

Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems.

60

Danielle Lake, “Jane Addams and Wicked Problems: Putting the Pragmatic Method to Use,” The Pluralist 9, no. 3 (2014): 77–94, https://doi.org/10.5406/PLURALIST.9.3.0077.

61

Chapman, “Lessons from a Pluralist Approach to a Wicked Policy Issue.”

62

Keith Grint, “Problems, Problems, Problems: The Social Construction of ‘Leadership,'” Human Relations 58, no. 11 (2005): 1467–94, https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726705061314; Keith Grint, “Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: The Role of Leadership,” in The New Public Leadership Challenge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 169–86, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277953_11.

63

Deanna Grant-Smith and Natalie Osborne, “Dealing with Discomfort: How the Unspeakable Confounds Wicked Planning Problems,” Australian Planner 53, no. 1 (2016): 46–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/07293682.2015.1135812.

64

D. Duckett et al., “Tackling Wicked Environmental Problems: The Discourse and Its Influence on Praxis in Scotland,” Landscape and Urban Planning 154 (October 2016): 44–56, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.03.015.

65

Donna M. Mertens, “Mixed Methods and Wicked Problems,” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 9, no. 1 (2015): 3–6, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1558689814562944.

66

Bland Tomkinson, Charles Engel, and Rosemary Tomkinson, “Dealing with Wicked Global Problems: An Inter-Disciplinary Approach,” in Collected Essays on Teaching and Learning: A World of Learning, vol. 2 (Windsor, ON: Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 2009), 24–32; Hugo F. Alrøe and Egon Noe, “Second-Order Science of Interdisciplinary Research: A Polyocular Framework for Wicked Problems,” Constructivist Foundations 10, no. 1 (2014): 65–76, http://constructivist.info/10/1/065.

67

Valerie A. Brown, John A. Harris, and Jacqueline Y. Russell, eds., Tackling Wicked Problems Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination (Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2010).

68

Judith E. Innes and David E. Booher, “Collaborative Rationality as a Strategy for Working with Wicked Problems,” Landscape and Urban Planning 154 (October 2016): 8–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.03.016.

69

Laurence J. O'Toole Jr., “Treating Networks Seriously: Practical and Research-Based Agendas in Public Administration,” Public Administration Review 57, no. 1 (1997): 45–52, https://doi.org/10.2307/976691; Kathryn R. Gabriele, “Lessons from a Buried Past: Settlement Women and Democratically Anchored Governance Networks,” Administration & Society 47, no. 4 (2015): 393–415, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095399713481600; Acey, “Managing Wickedness in the Niger Delta: Can a New Approach to Multi-Stakeholder Governance Increase Voice and Sustainability?”

70

Head, Ross, and Bellamy, “Managing Wicked Natural Resource Problems: The Collaborative Challenge at Regional Scales in Australia.”

71

Edward P. Weber and Anne M. Khademian,“From Agitation to Collaboration: Clearing the Air through Negotiation,” Public Administration Review 57, no. 5 (1997): 396–410, https://doi.org/10.2307/3109986; Edward P. Weber and Anne M. Khademian, “Managing Collaborative Processes: Common Practices, Uncommon Circumstances,” Administration & Society 40, no. 5 (2008): 431–64, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095399708320181; Edward P. Weber and Anne M. Khademian,“Wicked Problems, Knowledge Challenges, and Collaborative Capacity Builders in Network Settings,” Public Administration Review 68, no. 2 (2008): 334–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2007.00866.x.

72

Mirko Noordegraaf et al., “Weaknesses of Wickedness: A Critical Perspective on Wickedness Theory,” Policy and Society 38, no. 2 (2019): 278–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2019.1617970.

73

European Union, Horizon 2020, “Societal Challenges” (European Commission, n.d.), https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/societal-challenges.

74

Micah Altman and Chris Bourg, “A Grand Challenges-Based Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication and Information Science” (MIT Libraries Grand Challenges Summit, 2018), https://doi.org/10.21428/62b3421f.

75

Harold Varmus et al., “Grand Challenges in Global Health,” Science 302, no. 5644 (2003): 398, https://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.1091769.

76

Conklin, Basadur, and VanPatter, “Rethinking Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes”; Alford and Head, “Wicked and Less Wicked Problems: A Typology and a Contingency Framework”; B. Guy Peters, “What Is so Wicked About Wicked Problems? A Conceptual Analysis and a Research Program,” Policy and Society 36, no. 3 (2017): 385–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2017.1361633; B. Guy Peters and Matthew Tarpey, “Are Wicked Problems Really so Wicked? Perceptions of Policy Problems,” Policy and Society 38, no. 2 (2019): 218–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2019.1626595; Turnbull and Hoppe, “Problematizing ‘Wickedness': A Critique of the Wicked Problems Concept, from Philosophy to Practice.”

77

Alford and Head, “Wicked and Less Wicked Problems: A Typology and a Contingency Framework”; Termeer, Dewulf, and Biesbroek, “A Critical Assessment of the Wicked Problem Concept: Relevance and Usefulness for Policy Science and Practice.”

78

Noordegraaf et al., “Weaknesses of Wickedness: A Critical Perspective on Wickedness Theory.”

79

Head, “Forty Years of Wicked Problems Literature: Forging Closer Links to Policy Studies.”

80

Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems; Farrell and Hooker, “Design, Science and Wicked Problems”; Joshua Newman and Brian W. Head, “Wicked Tendencies in Policy Problems: Rethinking the Distinction between Social and Technical Problems,” Policy and Society 36, no. 3 (2017): 414–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2017.1361635; Peters, “What Is so Wicked About Wicked Problems? A Conceptual Analysis and a Research Program”; Peters and Tarpey, “Are Wicked Problems Really so Wicked? Perceptions of Policy Problems.”

81

Newman and Head, “Wicked Tendencies in Policy Problems: Rethinking the Distinction between Social and Technical Problems.”

82

Peters, “What Is so Wicked About Wicked Problems? A Conceptual Analysis and a Research Program.”

83

Farrell and Hooker, “Design, Science and Wicked Problems”; Newman and Head, “Wicked Tendencies in Policy Problems: Rethinking the Distinction between Social and Technical Problems”; Turnbull and Hoppe, “Problematizing ‘Wickedness': A Critique of the Wicked Problems Concept, from Philosophy to Practice.”

84

Termeer, Dewulf, and Biesbroek, “A Critical Assessment of the Wicked Problem Concept: Relevance and Usefulness for Policy Science and Practice”; Head, “Forty Years of Wicked Problems Literature: Forging Closer Links to Policy Studies.”

85

Allan McConnell, “Rethinking Wicked Problems as Political Problems and Policy Problems,” Policy & Politics 46, no. 1 (2018): 165–80, http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/030557317X15072085902640.

86

Head, “Forty Years of Wicked Problems Literature: Forging Closer Links to Policy Studies.”

87

Coyne, “Wicked Problems Revisited”; Rith and Dubberly, “Why Horst W. J. Rittel Matters.”

88

Zellner and Campbell “Planning for Deep-Rooted Problems: What Can We Learn from Aligning Complex Systems and Wicked Problems?,” 458.

89

Conklin, Basadur, and VanPatter, “Rethinking Wicked Problems: Unpacking Paradigms, Bridging Universes”; Skaburskis, “The Origin of ‘Wicked Problems.'”

90

Zellner and Campbell, “Planning for Deep-Rooted Problems: What Can We Learn from Aligning Complex Systems and Wicked Problems?”; Noordegraaf et al., “Weaknesses of Wickedness: A Critical Perspective on Wickedness Theory.”

91

Wei-Ning Xiang, “Working with Wicked Problems in Socio-Ecological Systems: Awareness, Acceptance, and Adaptation,” Landscape and Urban Planning 110 (February 2013): 2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.11.006.

92

Alford and Head, “Wicked and Less Wicked Problems: A Typology and a Contingency Framework.”

93

Marco Verweij et al., “Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World: The Case of Climate Change,” Public Administration 84, no. 4 (2006): 817–43, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-8159.2005.09566.x-i1.

94

Catrien J. A. M. Termeer and Art Dewulf, “A Small Wins Framework to Overcome the Evaluation Paradox of Governing Wicked Problems,” Policy and Society 38, no. 2 (2019): 298–314, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2018.1497933.

95

Tom Christensen, Ole Martin Lægreid, and Per Lægreid, “Administrative Coordination Capacity: Does the Wickedness of Policy Areas Matter?,” Policy and Society 38, no. 2 (2019): 237–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2019.1584147.

96

Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems; Head, “Forty Years of Wicked Problems Literature: Forging Closer Links to Policy Studies”; Duco Bannink and Willem Trommel, “Intelligent Modes of Imperfect Governance,” Policy and Society 38, no. 2 (2019): 198–217, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2019.1572576.

97

Peters and Tarpey, “Are Wicked Problems Really so Wicked? Perceptions of Policy Problems.”

98

Newman and Head, “Wicked Tendencies in Policy Problems: Rethinking the Distinction between Social and Technical Problems”; Alford and Head, “Wicked and Less Wicked Problems: A Typology and a Contingency Framework”; Head, “Forty Years of Wicked Problems Literature: Forging Closer Links to Policy Studies.”

99

Brian Head, “Wicked Problems in Public Policy,” Public Policy 3, no. 2 (2008): 101–8.

100

Sabrina Kirschke et al.,“Clusters of Water Governance Problems and Their Effects on Policy Delivery,” Policy and Society 38, no. 2 (2019): 255–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2019.1586081.

101

Bannink and Trammel, “Intelligent Modes of Imperfect Governance.”

102

Alford and Head, “Wicked and Less Wicked Problems: A Typology and a Contingency Framework.”

103

Guy B. Peters, “The Problem of Policy Problems,” Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 7, no. 4 (2005): 349–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/13876980500319204; John A. Hoornbeek and B. Guy Peters, “Understanding Policy Problems: A Refinement of Past Work,” Policy and Society 36, no. 3 (2017): 365–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2017.1361631.

104

Xiang, “Working with Wicked Problems in Socio-Ecological Systems: Awareness, Acceptance, and Adaptation”; Brian W. Head and Wei-Ning Xiang, “Working with Wicked Problems in Socio-Ecological Systems: More Awareness, Acceptance, and Adaptation,” Landscape and Urban Planning 154 (October 2016): 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.07.011; Brian W. Head and Wei-Ning Xiang, “Why Is an APT Approach to Wicked Problems Important?,” Landscape and Urban Planning 154 (October 2016): 4–7, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.03.018.

105

Catrien J. A. M. Termeer et al., “Governance Capabilities for Dealing Wisely with Wicked Problems,” Administration & Society 47, no. 6 (2015): 680–710, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0095399712469195.

106

Termeer, “Coping with the Wicked Problem of Climate Adaptation across Scales: The Five R Governance Capabilities.”

107

Head and Alford, “Wicked Problems: Implications for Public Policy and Management,” 722.

108

Robert M. Warner and Francis X. Blouin Jr., “Documenting the Great Migrations and a Century of Ethnicity in America,” American Archivist 39, no. 3 (1976): 319–28, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.39.3.1318m268q80275w2; Richard Juliani, “The Use of Archives in the Study of Immigration and Ethnicity,” American Archivist 39, no. 4 (1976): 469–77, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.39.4.bv1313755u726704. The spring 1985 issue of American Archivist is devoted to articles about documenting communities and social history, see Charles Schultz, “From the Editor,” American Archivist 48, no. 3 (1985): 259–60, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.48.3.066074546k860616; Dominique Daniel, “Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience in American Archives,” American Archivist 73, no. 1 (2010): 82–104, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27802716.

109

Daniel, “Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience in American Archives.”

110

Joel Wurl, “Ethnicity as Provenance: In Search of Values and Principles for Documenting the Immigrant Experience,” Archival Issues 29, no. 1 (2005): 65–76, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41102095. Archivist Michelle Light echoed this call, proposing that the Society of American Archivists should change its core value of responsible custody to responsible stewardship. Michelle Light, “From Responsible Custody to Responsible Stewardship,” in Archives Values: Essays in Honor of Mark A. Greene (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 2019). Archival scholar Jeannette Bastian recently proposed a custodial model of custody, care, control, and collaboration. Jeannette Bastian, “Mine, Yours, Ours: Archival Custody from Transaction to Narrative,” Archival Science 21, no. 1 (2021): 25–42.

111

Jeannette Bastian, “Taking Custody, Giving Access: A Postcustodial Role for a New Century,” Archivaria 53 (2002): 76–93, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12838; Bastian, Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003); Bastian, “Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation,” Archival Science 6, nos. 3–4 (2006): 267–84, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-9019-1; Bastian, “‘Play Mas': Carnival in the Archives and the Archives in Carnival: Records and Community Identity in the US Virgin Islands,” Archival Science 9, nos. 1–2 (2009): 113–25, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10502-009-9101-6.

112

Tara Mazurczyk et al., “American Archives and Climate Change: Risks and Adaptation,” Climate Risk Management 20 (2018): 111–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2018.03.005.

113

Matthew Gordon-Clark and Simon Shurville, “‘To Take Up Arms Against a Sea of Troubles': Finding Safe Havens for the National Archives of Low-Elevation Pacific Islands and Nations Threatened by Climate Change,” Archives and Manuscripts 38, no. 1 (2010): 78–93, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.201007446; Matthew Gordon-Clark, “Paradise Lost? Pacific Island Archives Threatened by Climate Change,” Archival Science 12, no. 1 (2012): 51–67, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-011-9144-3.

114

Heidi N. Abbey, “The Green Archivist: A Primer for Adopting Affordable, Environmentally Sustainable, and Socially Responsible Archival Management Practices,” Archival Issues 34, no. 2 (2012): 91–115, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/72389; Eira Tansey, “Archival Adaptation to Climate Change,” Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy 11, no. 2 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908146.

115

Mark Wolfe, “Beyond ‘Green Buildings': Exploring the Effects of Jevons' Paradox on the Sustainability of Archival Practices,” Archival Science 21, no. 1 (2012): 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1007/S10502-011-9143-4.

116

Eira Tansey and Robert D. Montoya, “Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene: An Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.156.

117

Erik Radio, “Documents for the Nonhuman,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2020): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.108; Dani Stuchel, “Material Provocations in the Archives,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.103.

118

Keith L. Pendergrass et al., “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation,” American Archivist 82, no. 1 (2019): 165–206, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165.

119

Ben Goldman, “It's Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change,” in Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark A. Greene, 182.

120

First Archivist Circle, “Protocols for Native American Archival Materials,” 2007, https://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/protocols.html.

121

Society of American Archivists Council, “SAA Council Endorsement of Protocols for Native American Archival Materials” (September 14, 2018), https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-council-endorsement-of-protocols-for-native-american-archival-materials, captured at https://perma.cc/8Q7U-DG4K. For further discussion about the Protocols, see Jennifer R. O'Neal, “‘The Right to Know': Decolonizing Native American Archives,” Journal of Western Archives 6, no. 1 (2015): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.26077/fc99-b022; Kay Mathiesen, “A Defense of Native Americans' Rights over Their Traditional Cultural Expressions,” American Archivist 75, no. 2 (2012): 456–81, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.75.2.0073888331414314.

122

Alex H. Poole, “The Information Work of Community Archives: A Systematic Literature Review,” Journal of Documentation 76, no. 3 (2020): 657–87, https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2019-0140.

123

Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream,” Archival Science 9, nos. 1–2 (2009): 71–86, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2; Anne Gilliland and Andrew Flinn, “Community Archives: What Are We Really Talking About?” (Nexus, Confluence, and Difference: Community Archives Meets Community Informatics: Prato CIRN Conference, Prato, Italy: Monash University, 2013), https://www.monash.edu/it/hcc/dedt/prato-conferences/prato-cirn-2013/prato2013papers.

124

Andrew Flinn and Mary Stevens, “‘It Is Noh Mistri, Wi Mekin History.' Telling Our Own Story: Independent and Community Archives in the UK, Challenging and Subverting the Mainstream,” in Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory (London: Facet Publishing, 2009), 8.

125

Anne Gilliland, Conceptualizing 21st-Century Archives (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2014), 20.

126

Rebecka Taves Sheffield, “Social Justice Struggles for Rights, Equality, and Identity: The Role of Lesbian and Gay Archives,” in Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice (London: Routledge, 2020).

127

Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing': Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,” American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 56–81, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56; Michelle Caswell et al., “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise': Community Archives and the Importance of Representation,” Archives and Records 38, no. 1 (2017): 5–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260445; Michelle Caswell et al., “Imagining Transformative Spaces: The Personal-Political Sites of Community Archives,” Archival Science 18, no. 1 (2018): 73–93, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-018-9286-7; Michelle Caswell et al., “‘What We Do Crosses over to Activism': The Politics and Practice of Community Archives,” The Public Historian 40, no. 2 (2018): 69–95, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.2.69.

128

Michelle Caswell and Ricardo Punzalan, “Critical Directions for Archival Approaches to Social Justice,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 86, no. 1 (2016): 25–42, https://doi.org/10.1086/684145.

129

Gilliland, Conceptualizing 21st-Century Archives, 20–21.

130

Rittel, “On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the ‘First and Second Generations,'” 394.

131

Rittel, “On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the ‘First and Second Generations,'” 394.

132

Stacie Williams and Jarrett Drake, “Power to the People: Documenting Police Violence in Cleveland,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.33.

133

In the Voice, Identity, and Activism Framework, Gilliland calls for a community-centric framework that will “present challenges necessitating a rethinking of ‘mainstream' archival practices.” Conceptualizing 21st-Century Archives, 21. See also Jimmy Zavala et al., “‘A Process Where We're All at the Table': Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice,” Archives and Manuscripts 45, no. 3 (2017): 202–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2017.1377088 for a study of how community archives challenge predominate archival practices.

134

Snowden Becker and Jean-François Blanchette, “On the Record, All the Time: Audiovisual Evidence Management in the 21st Century,” D-Lib Magazine 23, nos. 5–6 (June 2017), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may17/becker/05becker.html.

135

Becker and Blanchette, “On the Record, All the Time.” The archival field's engagement with electronic police data also includes archival scholar Stacy Wood's exploration of a thicket of issues including the authenticity and preservation of evidence, surveillance and civil liberties, vendor capture of police forces, and evidence being shaped by third-party platforms. Stacy Wood, “Police Body Cameras and Professional Responsibility: Public Records and Private Evidence,” Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture 46, no. 1 (2017): 41–51, https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2016-0030; Wood, “The Paradox of Police Data,” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 2, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.34; Wood, “Policing through Platform,” Computational Culture 7 (2019), http://computationalculture.net/policing-through-platform, captured at https://perma.cc/8RCG-GDQJ.

136

Anne Gilliland and Sue McKemmish, “Recordkeeping Metadata, the Archival Multiverse, and Societal Grand Challenges,” in 2012 Proceedings of International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 2012), 106–15; Gilliland, “Archival and Recordkeeping Traditions in the Multiverse and Their Importance for Researching Situations and Situating Research.”

137

Anne Gilliland, “Permeable Binaries, Societal Grand Challenges, and the Roles of the Twenty-First Century Archival and Recordkeeping Profession,” Archifacts (2015), 9, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/90q5538g.

138

I participated in one of these working groups. Marika Cifor et al., “Grand Challenges” (Archival Education and Research Institute, University of Pittsburgh, July 2014).

139

See for example, Richard J Cox and David A Wallace, eds., Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002); Sue McKemmish et al., eds., Archives: Recordkeeping in Society (Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 2005); Richard J Cox, Ethics, Accountability, and Recordkeeping in a Dangerous World (London: Facet, 2006); Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007); Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 2009).

140

For overviews of this literature, see Wendy M. Duff et al., “Social Justice Impact of Archives: A Preliminary Investigation,” Archival Science 13, no. 4 (2013): 317–48, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-012-9198-x; and Michelle Caswell, “Defining Human Rights Archives: Introduction to the Special Double Issue on Archives and Human Rights,” Archival Science 14, nos. 3–4 (2014): 207–13, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9226-0.

141

Center for Information as Evidence, UCLA, “Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Initiative,” n.d., https://informationasevidence.org/refugee-rights-in-records, captured at https://perma.cc/WA7J-7NNV.

142

Anne J. Gilliland and Kathy Carbone, “An Analysis of Warrant for Rights in Records for Refugees,” The International Journal of Human Rights 24, no. 4 (2020): 484, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2019.1651295.

143

Gilliland and Carbone, “An Analysis of Warrant for Rights in Records for Refugees.”

144

Anne J. Gilliland, “A Matter of Life and Death: A Critical Examination of the Role of Official Records and Archives in Supporting the Agency of the Forcibly Displaced,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.36.

145

Monash University, “Archives and the Rights of the Child Research Program,” n.d., https://rights-records.it.monash.edu/research-development-agenda/archives-and-rights-of-the-child-research-program, captured at https://perma.cc/CJQ2-JTQ2; Joanne Evans, “Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Summit,” Archives & Manuscripts 45, no. 3 (2017): 247–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2017.1373244; Joanne Evans, Sue McKemmish, and Gregory Rolan, “Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeeping in the Continuum,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 1–38, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.35; Joanne Evans, Sue McKemmish, and Gregory Rolan, “Participatory Information Governance: Transforming Recordkeeping for Childhood Out-of-Home Care,” Records Management Journal 29, nos. 1–2 (2019): 178–93, https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-09-2018-0041.

146

University College London, “MIRRA: Memory—Identity—Rights in Records—Access,” n.d., https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/mirra; Victoria Hoyle et al., “Child Social-Care Recording and the Information Rights of Care-Experienced People: A Recordkeeping Perspective,” British Journal of Social Work 49 (2019): 1856–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcy115; Elizabeth Shepherd et al., “Towards a Human-Centred Participatory Approach to Child Social Care Recordkeeping,” Archival Science 20, no. 4 (2020): 307–25, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-020-09338-9.

147

Heather MacNeil et al., “‘If There Are No Records, There Is No Narrative': The Social Justice Impact of Records of Scottish Care-Leavers,” Archival Science 18, no. 1 (2018): 1–28, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-017-9283-2; Viviane Frings-Hessami, “Care Leavers' Records: A Case for a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model,” Archives and Manuscripts 46, no. 2 (2018): 158–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2018.1444996; Cate O'Neil, “The Shifting Significance of Child Endowment Records at the National Archives of Australia,” Archival Science 19, no. 3 (2019): 235–53, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09315-x.

148

Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeeping in the Continuum”; Shepherd et al., “Towards a Human-Centred Participatory Approach to Child Social Care Recordkeeping.”

149

Joanne Evans et al., “Self-Determination and Archival Autonomy: Advocating Activism,” Archival Science 15, no. 4 (2015): 337–68, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9244-6; Frank Golding, “‘Problems with Records and Recordkeeping Practices Are Not Confined to the Past': A Challenge from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse,” Archival Science 20, no. 1 (2020): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/S10502-019-09304-0.

150

Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeeping in the Continuum”; Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Participatory Information Governance: Transforming Recordkeeping for Childhood Out-of-Home Care”; Sue McKemmish et al., “Decolonizing Recordkeeping and Archival Praxis in Childhood Out-of-home Care and Indigenous Archival Collections,” Archival Science 20, no. 1 (2020): 21–49, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-019-09321-z.

151

Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeeping in the Continuum”; Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Participatory Information Governance: Transforming Recordkeeping for Childhood Out-of-Home Care”; McKemmish et al., “Decolonizing Recordkeeping and Archival Praxis in Childhood Out-of-home Care and Indigenous Archival Collections.”

152

Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeeping in the Continuum”; Evans, “Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Summit”; Gregory Rolan et al., “Voice, Agency, and Equity: Deep Community Collaboration in Record-Keeping Research,” Information Research 24, no. 3 (2018), Proceedings of RAILS—Research Applications Information and Library Studies: Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, 28–30 November 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20190818103858/http://informationr.net/ir/24-3/rails/rails1803.html, captured at https://perma.cc/6J5G-FWPC; Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Participatory Information Governance: Transforming Recordkeeping for Childhood Out-of-Home Care”; McKemmish et al., “Decolonizing Recordkeeping and Archival Praxis in Childhood Out-of-home Care and Indigenous Archival Collections.”

153

Gregory Rolan, “Agency in the Archive: A Model for Participatory Recordkeeping,” Archival Science 17, no. 3 (2017): 195–225, https://doi.org/10.1007/S10502-016-9267-7; Hoyle et al., “Child Social-Care Recording and the Information Rights of Care-Experienced People: A Recordkeeping Perspective”; Shepherd et al., “Towards a Human-Centred Participatory Approach to Child Social Care Recordkeeping.”

154

The connection between wicked problems and information science stretches back to the initial formulation of the concept, when Rittel, along with systems scholar Werner Kunz, posited in a 1972 article that a wide range of managers, planners, leaders, and the public at large deploy information systems to address wicked problems. They argued that the study of information systems must, therefore, not be limited to scientific and technical details but must encompass a broader understanding of the problems those systems are deployed to address. Rittel and Kunz, “Information Science: On the Structure of Its Problems.”

155

Sue Childs and Julie McLeod, “Tackling the Wicked Problem of ERM: Using the Cynefin Framework as a Lens,” Records Management Journal 23, no. 3 (2013): 191–227, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-07-2013-0016; Chris Awre et al., “Research Data Management as a ‘Wicked Problem,'” Library Review 64, nos. 4–5 (2015): 356–71, https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-04-2015-0043; Andrew M. Cox, Stephen Pinfield, and Jennifer Smith, “Moving a Brick Building: UK Libraries Coping with Research Data Management as a ‘Wicked' Problem,” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 48, no. 1 (2016): 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0961000614533717; T. Scott Plutchak and Laurie Kaplan, “A Library Perspective: Data Wranglers in LibraryLand: Finding Opportunities in the Changing Policy Landscape,” The Serials Librarian 70 (2016): 14–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2016.1148497; Mathias Riechert et al., “Developing Definitions of Research Information Metadata as a Wicked Problem? Characterisation and Solution by Argumentation Visualisation,” Program 50, no. 3 (2016): 303–24, https://doi.org/10.1108/PROG-01-2015-0009.

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Gregory Rolan, “Towards Archive 2.0: Issues in Archival Systems Interoperability,” Archives and Manuscripts 43, no. 1 (2015): 42–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.959535.

157

Yee May Chua, “The Complex System Records Model: Recordkeeping for Wicked Problems” (master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012), 1.

158

Alan R. Hevner et al., “Design Science in Information Systems Research,” MIS Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2004): 75–105, https://doi.org/10.2307/25148625; Steven J. Bell, “Design Thinking,” American Libraries (February 2008), http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/112; Zaana Howard and Kate Davis, “From Solving Puzzles to Designing Solutions: Integrating Design Thinking into Evidence Based Practice,” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 6, no. 4 (2011): 15–21, https://doi.org/10.18438/B8TC81; Joanne Evans, “Capacities and Complexities: A Reflection on Design Methodologies for Archival and Recordkeeping Research,” in Research in the Archival Multiverse (Clayton, AUS: Monash University Publishing, 2017), 659–85.

159

Joyce Yukawa, “Preparing for Complexity and Wicked Problems through Transformational Learning Approaches,” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 56, no. 2 (2015): 158–68, https://doi.org/10.3138/jelis.56.2.158.

160

Kara Long et al., “The ‘Wicked Problem' of Neutral Description: Toward a Documentation Approach to Metadata Standards,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2017): 107–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2016.1278419.

161

Catherine Grant, “Endangered Musical Heritage as a Wicked Problem,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21, no. 7 (2015): 629–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2014.976245.

162

Shelley Wilkin and Peter G. Underwood, “Research on E-Book Usage in Academic Libraries: ‘Tame' Solution or a ‘Wicked Problem'?,” South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science 81, no. 2 (2015): 11–18, https://doi.org/10.7553/81-2-1560.

163

Enrico Ferro et al., “Policy Making 2.0: From Theory to Practice,” Government Information Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2013): 359–68, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.05.018.

164

Karin Garrety et al., “National Electronic Health Record Systems as ‘Wicked Projects': The Australian Experience,” Information Polity 21 (2016): 367–81, http://doi.org/10.3233/IP-160389.

165

Kirsten M. Winters, Judith B. Cushing, and Denise Lach, “Designing Visualization Software for Super-Wicked Problems,” Information Polity 21 (2016): 399–409, http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/IP-160400.

166

Yushim Kim and Jing Zhang, “Digital Government and Wicked Problems,” Government Information Quarterly 33 (2016): 769–76, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.10.004; Jing Zhang and Yushim Kim, “Digital Government and Wicked Problems: Solution or Problem?,” Information Polity 21 (2016): 215–21, http://doi.org/10.3233/IP-160395.

167

Kim and Zhang, “Digital Government and Wicked Problems,” 775.

168

Anneke Zuiderwijk et al., “The Wicked Problem of Commercial Value Creation in Open Data Ecosystems: Policy Guidelines for Governments,” Information Polity 21 (2016): 223–36, https://doi.org/10.3233/IP-160391.

169

Louise K. Comfort, Jennifer Bert, and Jee Eun Song, “Wicked Problems in Real Time: Uncertainty, Information, and the Escalation of Ebola,” Information Polity 21 (2016): 273–89, http://doi.org/10.3233/IP-160394.

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Sounman Hong and Sun Hyoung Kim, “Political Polarization on Twitter: Implications for the Use of Social Media in Digital Governments,” Government Information Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2016): 777–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.04.007.

171

Childs and McLeod, “Tackling the Wicked Problem of ERM: Using the Cynefin Framework as a Lens”; Julie McLeod and Sue Childs, “A Strategic Approach to Making Sense of the ‘Wicked' Problem of ERM,” Records Management Journal 23, no. 2 (2013): 104–35, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-04-2013-0009; Julie McLeod, “Reinventing Archival Methods: Reconceptualising Electronic Records Management as a Wicked Problem,” Archives and Manuscripts 42, no. 2 (2014): 193–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.911687.

172

Childs and McLeod, “Tackling the Wicked Problem of ERM: Using the Cynefin Framework as a Lens,” 192.

173

Long et al., “The ‘Wicked Problem' of Neutral Description: Toward a Documentation Approach to Metadata Standards”; Verweij, “Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World: The Case of Climate Change.”

174

Long et al., “The ‘Wicked Problem' of Neutral Description: Toward a Documentation Approach to Metadata Standards,” 112.

175

Long et al., “The ‘Wicked Problem' of Neutral Description: Toward a Documentation Approach to Metadata Standards,” 112.

176

Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott, “Toward the Archival Multiverse: Challenging the Binary Opposition of the Personal and Corporate Archive in Modern Archival Theory and Practice,” Archivaria 76 (2013): 111–14, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13461; Shannon Faulkhead and Kirsten Thorpe, “Dedication: Archives and Indigenous Communities,” in Research in the Archival Multiverse (Clayton, AUS: Monash University Publishing, 2017), 2–15.

177

The Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI), Pluralizing the Archival Curriculum Group (PACG), “Educating for the Archival Multiverse,” American Archivist 74, no. 1 (2011): 73, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.hv339647l2745684.

178

The Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI), Pluralizing the Archival Curriculum Group (PACG), “Educating for the Archival Multiverse,” 73.

179

Sue McKemmish, “ARK Research: The State of the Art” (Archival Education and Research Institute, Kent State University, July 2016); Evans, McKemmish, and Rolan, “Critical Approaches to Archiving and Recordkeeping in the Continuum.”

180

Evans, “Capacities and Complexities: A Reflection on Design Methodologies for Archival and Recordkeeping Research,” 663.

181

Anne J. Gilliland and Mirna Willer, “Metadata for the Information Multiverse,” in iConference 2014 Proceedings (Berlin, 2014), 1117–1120, http://hdl.handle.net/2142/47417.

182

Evans, “Capacities and Complexities: A Reflection on Design Methodologies for Archival and Recordkeeping Research,” 664.

183

See, for example, the Society of American Archivists Council's statement on Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd in which Council reiterates SAA's “core organizational value of social responsibility.” “SAA Council Statement on Black Lives and Archives” (June 2, 2020), https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-council-statement-on-black-lives-and-archives, captured at https://perma.cc/755H-A3XG.

184

Archival scholar Marika Cifor and others incorporating affect theory as a vehicle for addressing social justice in archives is one of many examples of the profession incorporating an external theory into its work. Marika Cifor, “Affecting Relations: Introducing Affect Theory to Archival Discourse,” Archival Science 16, no. 1 (2016): 7–31, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9261-5. See also the 2016 special issue of Archival Science 16, no. 1, “Affect and the Archive, Archives and their Affects.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eliot Wilczek is a records and knowledge management engineer at The MITRE Corporation. He previously worked as a records manager and archivist at Tufts University, Brandeis University, and Bowdoin College. He has a PhD in library and information science from Simmons University.