Critical Archives Reading Group, 2024-25

Many members of our community are thinking about the topic of critical archives. 
In view of this, we have created an Critical Archives Reading Group for 2024-25 as part of Monumental Archives, a larger collaborative project. Participants will read and discuss key classic and new texts from a variety of disciplinary and professional perspectives on the making, unmaking, challenges and potential in "archives." Readings for the fall semester and meeting dates for the spring are listed below. All articles will be available in a shared folder by mid-summer; for access to the folder and ongoing email updates, you'll need to sign up using the google form below.  We started a collaborative bibliography and will continue to populate it with this group throughout the year.
 

Interested? Please complete the Critical Archives Reading Group Google form!

Click here to view the Monumental Archives Zotero group.

 

Meeting Dates and Readings:

The group will meet on the following days from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m.

September 20

Caswell, Michelle, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand. “Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (June 27, 2017).

Cook, Terry, and Joan M. Schwartz. “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance.” Archival Science 2, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 171–85. 

Trouillot, Michele-Rolph. Silencing the Past:  Power and the Production of History (1995).

October 18

Hartman, Sadiya.  “Venus in Two Acts” small axe 26 (June 2008) , p 1–14.

Muñiz, Wendy. “Critical Archival Theory and the Caribbean’s Neoliberal Archival Turn.” Archival Science 22, no. 2 (June 1, 2022): 239–57. 

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 87–109.

November 15

Bastian, Jeannette Allis. “Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation.” Archival Science 6, no. 3 (December 1, 2006): 267–84.

Popper, Nicholas. The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain (2023).

December 13POSTPONED
January 24

Berry, Dorothy. “Take Me into the Library and Show Me Myself: Toward Authentic Accessibility in Digital Libraries,”  Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (2022).

Farmer, Ashley. “Archiving While Black,” AAIHS Black Perspectives (2018).

Fuentes, Marisa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016).

February 14

Frage, Arlette, The Allure of the Archive (excerpt)

Watson, B.M., “Please Stop Calling Things Archives” Perspectives (2021)

Pierson-Smith, Anne and Ben Peirson-Smith, “Fashion Archive Fervour:  The Critical Role of Fashion Archives in Preserving, Curating, and Narrating Fashion,” Archives and Records (2021)

March 14

Brilmeyer , Gracen, et al., “Reciprocal Archival Imaginaries:  The Shifting Boundaries of “Community” in Community Archives” Archivaria (year)

Ilerbaig, Juan. “Archives as Sediments: Metaphors of Deposition and Archival Thinking.” Archival Science 21, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 83–95.

April 18Prescott, Andrew and Alison Wiggins, eds. Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction (Oxford UP, 2023), Introduction and selection of your choice.