Full Description
A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies.
What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.
Unsettling Archival Researchis one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to counteract, resist, and explore alternatives to racist, colonial histories and which approaches best support such work. They also confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival theories and methodologies. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline's assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.
Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction—Romeo GarcÍa, Gesa E. Kirsch, Walker P. Smith, and Caitlin Burns Allen
Part One. Unsettling Key Concepts
1. Unsettling the "Archive Story"—Jean Bessette
2. Rescuing the Archive from What?—Wendy Hayden
3. Narratives of Triumph: A Case Study of the Polio Archive—Jackie M. James
4. Nostalgia in the Archives: Using Nostalgia as a Tool for Negotiating Ideological Tensions—Kalyn Prince
5. A Matter of Order: The Power of Provenance in the Mercury Collection of Marion Lamm—Kathryn Manis and Patty Wilde
Part Two. Unsettling Research, Theory, and Methodology
6. Hidden in Plain Sight: Rescuing the Archives from Disciplinarity—LynÉe Lewis Gaillet and Jessica A. Rose
7. (En)Countering Archival Silences: Critical Lenses, Relationships, and Informal Archives—MarÍa P. Carvajal Regidor
8. Let Them Speak: Rhetorically Reimagining Prison Voices in the Archives of the Collective—Sally F. Benson
9. Bearing Witness to Transient Histories—Pamela Takayoshi
10. The Rhetorical (Im)possibilities of Recovering George Barr: Toward a Decolonial Queer Archival Methodology—Walker P. Smith
Part Three. Unsettling Praxis and Pedagogy: Towards Pluriversality
11. Archival Imaginings of the Working-Class College Woman: The 1912-1913 Scrapbook of Josephine Gomon, University of Michigan College Student—Liz Rohan
12. Decolonizing the Transnational Collection: A Heuristic for Teaching Digital Archival Curation and Participation—Tarez Samra Graban
13. Archiving as Learning: Digital Archiving As Heuristic for Transformative Undergraduate Education—Jennifer Almjeld
14. Settling Emerging Scholars in Unsettling Territory: A Case Study—Rebecca Schneider and Deborah Hollis
15. Unsettling Archival Pedagogy—Amy J. Lueck and Nadia Nasr
Contributors
