Techne Conflux: Materiality and Critical Archive Studies 

3rd Feb 2020 11:00am-1:00pm 

This workshop is offered as a Techne Conflux, an extended training, development, exhibition or performance programme which aims to enhance research or intellectual skills, or facilitate the sharing of expertise amongst doctoral students in the arts and humanities.

Sign up: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/materiality-and-critical-archive-studies-professor-maryanne-dever-tickets-89726619735?ref=estw

Professor Maryanne Dever will be speaking on materiality and Critical Archive Studies:

In this session I pose a series of questions about the importance of materiality for how researchers understand and work with paper in the form of the archived page. Drawing examples from research among literary papers and personal correspondence I highlight how the conditions of the digital turn provide for a return to ‘thinking through paper’ and a new sensitivity to the affordances of the page. I will challenge in particular that idea that digital formats might spell the ‘end’ of our concerns with paper and instead explore how the various new and emergent technologies that promised to replace paper have only enlivened our understandings of archival materialities. Put differently, I argue that that which was initially thought to diminish the archived page in its materiality has ironically only enlarged it for us.

Professor Dever is an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia. Currently seconded to the role of Executive Director, LX Transformation. She is also joint Editor-in-Chief of Australian Feminist Studies.

Lunch and refreshments are provided.

 

This event is part of the Techne Conflux and Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories: Rethinking Archival Research, Methods and Practice series.

The Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories has secured Techne funding for a two-year Conflux programme that can address key methodologies and historiographies associated with archival research, practices and critical perspectives.

The archive’s authoritative status has come under increasing pressure across the arts and humanities in the last thirty years or so. This richly diverse programme of workshops and lectures will provide a framework to explore bigger questions about the ways in which the archive has been critiqued, problematised and de-centred in a range of academic disciplines, cultural contexts and professional settings.

Examining topics like ‘spontaneous’ community archives, ‘performing the archive’, the archival ‘turn’ and feminist archival practices, as well as what it means in practice to decolonise the imperial archive, the programme aims to highlight the extent to which differing approaches and methods can further enhance the generative possibilities of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. The programme includes collaborative workshops with The National Archives, National Theatre, West Sussex Record Office, The Keep and the University’s Design Archives, amongst other guest speakers.

For more details about the programme click here.