Posters with Glitter Issues: Online Colloquia with Jessica Lapp

Posted by mdever on December 29, 2021 in activism, archival labour, archival research, archives, conservation, feminism, materiality, preservation, public lecture, research

As part of the University of British Columbia School of Information Colloquia, on 3 February 2022 Jessica Lapp will be presenting her work on the Newberry Library’s collection of 2017 Women’s March ephemera. The paper builds on her research program which conceptualizes feminist records creation, expanded notions of provenance and records attribution, and the creation and circulation of digital records of feminist organizing. Her paper, “Posters with Glitter Issues” engages quite literally with questions of preservation and messy materiality.

Abstract

The  Newberry Library’s Chicago Protest Collection is bright, glitzy and glittery; these materials shed, spread, and intermingle in the stacks.  This talk explores the ‘leaky’ nature of feminist and queer protest ephemera by ‘following the glitter’ through the Newberry Library’s collection of 2017 Women’s March ephemera. Thinking alongside archival theorizing on the archival body, and feminist and queer studies of glitter as world-building, I trace and corral glitter across four distinct, but interpolated acts of records shaping that constitute the Newberry Library’s collection of protest materials: Initial inscription (glitter on the hands), collective constitution (glitter on the street), institutional archivalization (glitter on the floor), and artistic use (glitter in the air). In undertaking this analysis, I demonstrate how this bright and glittery archival body continually creates, sustains, obscures, and fabulates feminist and queer life worlds.

Details on booking for the webinar can be found here.

You can also find Jessica Lapp’s recent article on this research, ‘Posters with Glitter Issues: Exploring Archival (W)holes at the Newberry Library’ in Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).