Befriending (beyond) the Archive: Imaginaries of Richard Ryder

Australian Feminist Studies, 27:72 (2012), 221-23.

Archival Science, 2015

Archival Science, 2021

Working outside traditional bureaucratic structures, animal activists have a long history of creating, managing and using records in radical ways to bring the suffering of animals to society’s attention. Today’s online platforms enable animal activism on a networked scale, with unprecedented reach and immediacy of impact, but also with risks and challenges. This article presents findings from a critical case study of the radical recordkeeping of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a US-based animal liberation group. The case study explores the performative role recordkeeping plays in the group’s animal activism and advocacy, and the challenge of ensuring the longevity of an archival record of its activities and their impact. It is framed by Records Continuum Theory and illustrates the benefits of applying a Records Continuum lens to researching radical recordkeeping contexts. The paper reports on the research findings of the case study, including the vital role recordkeeping plays as a ...

Archivaria, 2015

Debates about the politics of the archive centre largely on the archive’s role in knowledge production. Often critiques focus on the archive’s control of information and its use in maintaining privileged groups’ power. Within these debates, it is often institutional archives (e.g., government, university, professional organizations) that are discussed and, as a result, archival power is largely conceived of as domination. In this article, I seek to re-imagine the politics of the archive from the perspective of autonomous archives and from activist archival practices in order to explore archival power as an enabling force. I draw upon fieldwork at the 56a Infoshop Archive and from the Southwark Notes Archive Group, both in London, England. Using an ethnographic approach, I focus on the formation of the Archive and its activation in political struggles, examining the relationship between archiving, knowledge production, and political practices. I argue that autonomous, activist archiv...

Archival Science, 2015

The archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society. But I will stick by what I have said about other scholars, and argue that the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake. If so, the rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not, as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft (Zinn 1977). This special issue of Archival Science ''Archiving Activism and Activist Archiving'' examines the intersections between contemporary archival practice and activism in different national, political, socioeconomic , technological, archival settings, and inspired by a variety of motivations and objectives. The practices examined in these articles go beyond advocacy for more active archival approaches and incorporate the spaces and endeavours where archivists seek to creatively document political and social movement activism as well as those projects which engage with archives and the archival process as part or in support of political, human right and social movement activism.

Course Paper for Film 6320B at York University. The paper discusses activism, feeling and the concept of feminist archives.

Archives and Records, 2017

This paper explores the notion of archiving as radical activist activity, focusing on why and how archival collections are created, used and animated by communities embedded in housing struggles and political movements. This article is based on interviews with activist groups in Elephant and Castle, South London, campaigning against a local urban regeneration scheme. The focus here is on contemporary history-making, and how archival material can be used to construct a useful past for the purposes of campaigning and activism. The paper will assess how archiving is used as a campaigning tool within housing struggles, and how the archive space is transformed into a site of resistance and contestation in this context. The paper will explore how archives are activated and used in the 'here and now' to mobilize, engage and provoke response. The paper emphasizes the idea of archives as a place and the activist as curator, considering what alternative uses of the archive offer to an activist community. Additionally, it explores how activists curate and collect archival information, examining the use of Freedom of Information as a collecting strategy, and how data curation and visualizations allow new interpretations of archival material to be imagined. Just because it's knocked down, doesn't mean it's dead. Heygate [Estate] lives in the sense of what it was: a complete scandal, social cleansing, gentrification, disrespect, death -people died from that -displacement, so that's something we're thinking about when we archive. 1 Taking this quotation as a starting point, this article will explore why and how regeneration and housing struggles provide a strong impetus for archival activity, and how such archives hold the power to resist and criticize local regeneration schemes. This will be placed within the wider context of community archives, archival activism / active archiving, 2 and how the archival drive can be read as 'political and subversive, ' driven by notions of social justice, and challenging representations in the formal heritage sector. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness in the archival profession of the existence and role of community/independent archives.

Archival Science, 2009

Humanities award, the conference was part of the ongoing Investigating the Archive project which was established to examine the role and nature of archives and the debates surrounding their selection, application and interpretation. The project aims at promoting interdisciplinary scholarship on research into the construction, representation and use of archives, examining the theoretical issues inherent in their preservation and interpretation in all formats. Two other interdisciplinary conferences have been held during the first phase of the project: A Triangular Traffic: Literature, Slavery and the Archive , which considered the literary/archival and creative and scholarly work in literature, grounded in archival research; and Media, Migration, Archive (2008), which examined the issues surrounding the use of photographic collections, both practically and theoretically. The second of these brought together archivists and theorists from a variety of disciplines for discussions relating to historical context, method and policy in the context of the empirical investigation of photography's archival presence. Two workshops, 'Across the Divide: Interdisciplinary Dialogues on the Archive' and 'Archives and Publics' sustained the interrogative and self-reflexive methodological critiques brought to light during the conferences.