Category Archives: archival labour

CULTURE MAPPING 2022 — Archives and Afterlives: recordings available

If you did not manage to catch up with this wonderful conference event live on 7-9 April 2022 you can now find recordings for most sessions online. Keynote sessions feature Professor Jacqueline Wernimont, Dartmouth College: On Dying and Being Dead in an Archive, Jacqueline Wernimont Abstract: What are the temporalities of archives? In this talk, […]

Posters with Glitter Issues: Online Colloquia with Jessica Lapp

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 […]

Reanimating Working-Class Writing

In a special issue of Across the Disciplines entitled ‘Unsettling the Archives’, Jessica Pauszek contributes an article entitled Preserving Hope: Reanimating Working-Class Writing through (Digital) Archival Co-Creation. In a section dedicated to ‘Bearing Witness in Unsettling Ways’, Pauszek traces how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried […]

NEW BOOK: Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration

Jane Birkin‘s new book, Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), will almost certainly be of interest to readers of this blog. Birkin writes in her introduction that she aims ‘to communicate the meaning of the archive through its operations, which I have observed on a day-to-day basis. At the same […]

New out: Producing the Archival Body

“What can the body do in and for archives?” is the provocation that Jamie A. Lee sets out in Producing the Archival Body. Newly released in the Routledge Studies in Archives series edited by James Lowry, Lee’s book brings critical archival theory together with queer theory to argue for a new understanding of how archival […]

Archives work is emotional work

Reposted from Archive Steph, a reminder of the work of archivists: “More technically, archives work is emotional work. This can be through the cataloguing of the outputs of people’s intimate inner lives (personal papers, email, correspondence, family photos). Sometimes we are taking meticulous care over documenting the life of someone who we don’t like very […]

Poetry manuscripts: Two articles

Two recent articles from Alison Fraser, assistant curator of the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo may of interest. Both focus in part on questions of materiality — the manuscript as ‘trash’ and the clipping. The articles are: ‘Creating the Twentieth-Century Literary Archives: A Short History of the Poetry Collection at the University at […]

Boxes: A Field Guide — Download this new book free

Mattering Press has published this quirky book, Boxes: A Field Guide edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi. This is not a book that deals explicitly with archives, but it does raise some exciting questions about archival materiality, given we often first encounter archived papers via boxes. As the Mattering Press site observes: “This […]

New! Online Dictionary of Archives Terminology

Compiled by SAA’s Dictionary Working Group, the Dictionary of Archives Terminology (DAT) expands upon A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology by Richard Pearce-Moses (SAA, 2005). With this web-only publication, the Dictionary Working Group has expanded the connections made for each entry and added hyperlinks to take you directly to related terms. Entries have been added to one […]

Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research wins prize!

The Routledge collection, Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research edited by Maryanne Dever has been awarded a 2018 Mander Jones award from the Australian Society of Archivists. The prize is awarded to the “publication making the greatest contribution to the archives profession in Australia”. The judges’ citation reads: “An impressive scholarly work bringing together twelve thought-provoking and […]