The language we use as a community and a collections sector continually evolves. We use certain language until directly represented people and communities offer better language to describe experiences and materials. In so doing, no term, phrase, or vocabulary is evergreen, and our organizations (and the people who power them) need ways to indicate and invite flexibility in arrangement and description of the collections that will live long after we have left our desks. In our final antiracism program for 2025, we invite participants to think about how we talk about the stuff we steward - keywords, descriptions, harmful language, reparative language, and more. This interactive program creates space to discuss how language has and might change over time, how practitioners in the field handle this now, and what we can do to plan for flexible, relevant description in the future.
