An Archive for the People

Housing advocate, lawyer, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural producer Rasheedah Phillips connects housing justice, archival practice, and community futurisms through her work. Phillips investigates time, memory, and Black futurist methods of community survival through web-based initiatives, zines, cinema, speculative fiction, printmaking, performance, installation, and social practice. In addition to co-founding Black Quantum Futurism and founding The AfroFuturist Affair, she helped establish the Community Futures Lab, a socially conscious art and research initiative that addresses memory, displacement, redevelopment, and preservation. As the former Director of Housing Futures and Land Justice at PolicyLink, she advocated for land-use, housing, and tenant rights. Her book Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space and Time (2025) explores how our perceptions of time are built on colonial ideas and how engaging with Afrodiasporic concepts of time supports a liberatory vision. Phillips served as a Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellow from 2020 to 2022, during which she developed Time Zone Protocols, a project exploring the agreements, protocols, and rules underlying Westernized time constructs. Using Afrofuturist theories, Phillips analyzed the “Protocol Proceedings” developed at the 1884 International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., situating the international and U.S. time zones within a social and political context that highlights questions of access and agency. Readers of Scholarly Editing should be intrigued by how Phillips reimagines archives, empowers community, and challenges institutional practice. Phillips shows how archives can be used as instruments for collective memory, policy action, and community self-determination.