Investigating the archive: An interdisciplinary enquiry into the concept and role of archives
'Investigating the archive' is a Royal Society of Edinburgh sponsored project to encourage innovative research into the concept and role of the archive. We hope to generate useful, provocative and searching questions of a methodological and theoretical nature on how archives are assembled and preserved, and the uses to which they are put.
Areas of investigations include:
- the philosophy, politics and ethics of identifying, selecting and preserving
- debates surrounding evidential and historical value
- social/political/institutional agendas and the changing nature of archives
- disciplinary interfaces impacting on the interpretation and use of archival material.
- the narrativisation of archival collections in the context of regional, state or national imagined communities
There will be three major symposia between September 2007-8. Each symposium will have a particular thematic focus:
- 'A Triangular Traffic': Literature, Slavery and the Archive (2-3 November 2007)
- The Philosophy of the Archive (Spring, 2008)
- Visual Culture and the Archive of Migration (Summer, 2008)
In addition to the three symposia, two smaller day workshops are planned. The workshops will serve to sustain the interrogative and self-reflexive methodological questioning initiated during the main events. In this manner, it is hoped that scholars with different methodological outlooks on the archive - and archival research - can work together in a productive dialogue or tension.
If you are interested in receiving further information about the above symposia and workshops, please e-mail G.Low@dundee.ac.uk or write to:
Dr Gail Low
English
School of Humanities
University of Dundee
Dundee
DD1 4HN
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