Who do you think you are? On archives, power and the user who (doesn’t) matter
By Durga Saraya, adopted from India to the Netherlands, researcher in archives and adoption
As a researcher in the field of archives and adoption, I wanted to understand what has been recorded about us as adoptees and about the adoption system, how that information came into existence, what is missing, and why.
My research question arose from a simple need: to gain control over information. What followed, however, was not a straightforward process of requests and access, but a confrontation with an information world that presents itself as transparent, while in practice proving selectively accessible once you begin to question it.
More Than Documents
The archival world turned out to be much more than an infrastructure of documents. It is also a culture and a power structure, which I came to know firsthand and without censorship. Rules, procedures, and professional standards appeared to go hand in hand with personal convictions and emotional blind spots. While one staff member worked constructively with me, another effectively closed the archive door through grandiose legal language and verbal dominance.
Public values are invoked across the political spectrum, yet in practice they are both rigid and unclear. Even suggestions that I further educate myself through archival training programs were actively discouraged.
Over the past two years, as a researcher of archives and adoption, I experienced a continuous stream of systemic, racist, and colonial violence. These experiences were difficult to prove because my complaints were consistently subordinated to those of the institutions that simultaneously judged me and safeguarded their own legitimacy. At one point, it felt like an inversion of control, similar to Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, in which the audience was given free rein and public values were expected to do the work. It was a bitter parallel to an archival system that appeals to rules while placing the full burden of their consequences on the user—in this case, on me as a researcher.
To whom is this information public?
In many conversations with stakeholders, archivists, inspectors, and policymakers both domestically and internationally, I was repeatedly told how “the information system” works. At the same time, my position as someone asking questions was itself constantly examined closely: Who are you? What are you here to do? Are you objective enough? These are not innocent questions. They are gatekeeping questions.
My personal involvement as an adoptee and my emotional connection to the subject were rarely acknowledged as sources of knowledge. Instead, they were eagerly used as reasons for caution. It was as if those for whom these archives are of existential importance were automatically considered too close to the subject to meaningfully interpret it as researchers. Unfounded distance was treated as legitimacy, while proximity was viewed as a risk.
At the Dutch National Archives, I was even told: “Come back in two years. Then we will have finished everything. We have no need whatsoever for your questions.” My appearance and communication style were sometimes used from the moment I walked through the door to suggest that, as a woman of colour, I expressed myself “too closely” toward certain men working in archives. I repeatedly asked myself why my authenticity and professional intentions could so easily be twisted into sexual insinuations. This undermined my research and continues to affect me deeply. As a researcher, I want the freedom to express questions, engagement, and humanity without reservation.
Public access as a human issue
The archival practices surrounding adoption expose a painful core issue within principles of public access. Public access is not a legal end state, however much we might want to describe and preserve it as such. It is fundamentally a relational practice in which decisions are constantly made about:
– who gets access,
– who is allowed to speak,
– and who is considered credible.
Ultimately, this concerns people and human rights. The issue is not merely whether a document is publicly available. The reader’s lived experience merges with the archival record, and together they shape the meaning of public access.
Policy documents often refer abstractly to “the user of the archive” as a citizen, researcher, or journalist. In adoption archives, however, the user is highly concrete and embodied. For adoptees and birth parents, the archive user is someone searching for origins, identity, and family. For them, a file is not an administrative object but a foundation of existence. Historically, archives have been organized around distance, reconstruction, interpretation, and retrospective analysis.
Yet for a growing group of users, the archive is not the past, it is a present reality. Not a source. A mirror. Not an object of study. A condition for existence.
System behaviour and information monopolies
During my research I spoke with tens of people within and around the archival field. I encountered committed professionals, but also destructive coldness, resistance, distrust, and at times open hostility. I observed how personal beliefs held by archivists, senior civil servants, and directors concerning adoption, ancestry, and “how things were done in the past” influenced the treatment of people seeking access to documents. Historical context and “the spirit of the times” were often invoked before anyone had even seen the documents themselves. Interpretation was not merely informed by information, it was framed in advance.
This is not an isolated incident. It is system behaviour. Within this system, access, interpretation, and legitimacy are structurally regulated.
Who may ask questions?
Who is taken seriously?
Who is permitted to assign meaning?
Control over information turns out not to be a neutral ambition but a question of distribution and therefore a question of power.
Control over information: personal and political
For adoptees, policies governing access to and control over personal information are not merely administrative arrangements but directly concern autonomy and self-determination. Archives operate within legal frameworks that are often not designed to provide meaningful access to information supporting the right to identity. Many documents were created within international and colonial contexts, and those structures continue to shape procedures, records, and assessments of credibility.
Experiences that do not fit the system’s expectations are often treated as if they are not reflected in the documents themselves. As a result, the search for origins is not only personal. It is political.
Public access policy as a form of power
This leads to a deeper question: not merely what public access means, but what public-access policy actually does within a human-rights context.
Transparency cannot be reduced to simple access to documents. It requires reflection on power, position, and the role of archival institutions themselves. Archives are not merely custodians of information. They are also gatekeepers of meaning. They determine:
– which information is made available,
– to whom, and under what disclaimers.
What is often overlooked is that public access also includes the experiences of users.
Information changes lives. What unfolds in those lives when someone reads and discovers the contents of a file should not be hidden away. Recognizing that impact is an essential component of public-access policy. The most uncomfortable realization, perhaps, is that this requires abandoning the assumption that archives operate neutrally.
Putting the user at the centre
Calls to “put the user at the centre” have existed for years. But as long as we fail to ask who that user is, and who is allowed to be that user, it remains an empty promise. Real centering means taking uncomfortable voices, critical questions, and embodied knowledge seriously precisely because they are close to the subject matter.
My research made one thing unavoidable: Archives are not neutral repositories.
They are places where meaning is produced, directed, and (sometimes) actively constrained. The question is therefore not simply how we make information accessible, but:
– For whom?
– Under what conditions?
– And whose right to interpret is recognised?
Until archival institutions and the government bodies connected to them ask themselves these questions explicitly and critically, public access will remain a selective privilege. For some, control over information will be self-evident. For others, it will remain a struggle that never ends.
This article was originally published in Dutch magazine MEI 2026