Origins of the 'Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective' (Emma G)

In this piece, Maria Cotera describes her collaboration with filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant. This partnership began in 2007 after Linda attended the 30^th anniversary of the 1977 National Women’s Conference – a conference the women had both attended with their mothers in the late 70's (p. 488).  mothers whom were integral in championing “the issues of poor women, working women, and women of color would be addressed” (p. 488) throughout the conference, and whom worked to make certain that these issues would be included in women’s movement efforts not only in the late 1970’s but thereafter.  

However, the 30^th anniversary conference largely erased this history, and included only one Latina woman keynote speaker. These women are inspired by scholarly work seeking to call attention to neoliberal academia’s tendency to re-write history by erasing  - or at least collapsing - the experiences of marginalized subjects into a monolithic “protestor” or “scholar” identity that creates an implicitly cis white hetero (and often male – although in the case of the women’s conference this was not the case) person as the “do-er” – without considering how people with less privilege must do differently. In other words, the conference – much like the DH manifesto – fails to properly acknowledge that subjects whose position’s hold less power in institutional hierarchies do much more with very often much less pay (see Andy Hines and Roderick Ferguson) to create space and build community. In addition to Roderick Ferguson and Andy Hines, Cotera cites Tara McPherson’s work, “calling attention to the whiteness of the field and its practices” and “dousing its tendency toward digital utopianism” with the actuality of how systemic injustice operates and is continuously reinforced in the real world. Cotera also references Moya Bailey’s work to transform how people understand what scholarly work is or can be, ultimately claiming that the aforementioned scholars “…respond to Moten and Harney’s call for ‘fugitive’ scholars to transform the university into a ‘place of refuge’ by ‘stealing’ the tools, resources, and time that the institution offers and putting them to use for subversive education projects” (p. 486).

Thusly, Cotera explains how,

“The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective began as a project focused on building a digital repository of oral histories and documents from women who were active at the nexus of multiple movements in the long civil rights period”

but that their

“… focus shifted from the end goal of producing a repository to exploring the process of collecting itself. We began to reimagine the digital archive not as a site of top-down knowledge delivery but as an active space of exchange and “encuentro” between the present and the past that had the potential to enact new strategies of alliance and a new praxis of Chicana feminism at the intersection of digital and analog culture” (p. 489). 

My Question:
In the vein of Bailey's goal to re-conceptualize what counts as "scholarly" - from the types of research academics do, to their subjects (or objects, in the case of texts) of study - would you argue for or against the tendency to include the personal reflections (scholars' reflexive writings/ art pieces/ etc.)  of those producing and reconceptualizing work in critical university studies or in the digital humanities as a part of the archive? What benefits or drawbacks might result from scholars describing their own orientations to the work?