Local Contexts
Ashley Rojas is an experienced Integration Specialist and Web Developer currently working at Local Contexts since May 2022. Previously, Ashley held the position of Business Data and Reporting Analyst at Brooklyn College from July 2020 to May 2022. Prior roles include various positions at Hunter College, such as Financial Aid Advisor and College Assistant in the Financial Aid Office, in addition to a Teaching Assistant role at the American Museum of Natural History. Ashley began professional experience as a Front Desk Associate at Equinox and a College Intern at the American Museum of Natural History. Education includes a Master's degree in Digital Humanities from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a Bachelor's degree in Classical Studies and Classical Archaeology from Hunter College.
This person is not in any teams
This person is not in any offices
Local Contexts
Every Indigenous community has cultural and biological collections and data within national archives, libraries, museums and other public and private repositories that they do not own, do not control, and cannot govern circulation over. Significant information about these collections, including individual and community names and proper provenance information is absent. Issues of responsibility, ownership, as well as the incomplete and/or significant mistakes in the metadata extend to every other knowledge asset or digital record building upon this information. The Local Contexts project was developed in 2010 and grew from the needs of Indigenous and local organizations who wanted a practical method to deal with the range of intellectual cultural property issues that arise in relation to managing cultural heritage materials, Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous data. Local Contexts offers a robust system of digital labelling to intervene in the structural and ongoing colonial digital legacy of Indigenous erasure. The Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels and Notices work to enhance and legitimize locally based decision-making and Indigenous governance frameworks for determining ownership, access, and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical, contemporary, and future collections of cultural heritage and Indigenous data.