Category: Call for Papers

CFP: BitCurator Forum

BitCurator Forum 2024 – 10 Years of BCC

Please note that the 2024 Forum will be virtual. We encourage in-person satellite events to be organized in conjunction with the virtual forum, see below for more information. We will be adding information to the Event page as it becomes available. We hope to see you there!

The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) invites proposals for the 2024 BitCurator Forum to be held virtually the week of March 18-22, 2024 (final dates TBD). An international, community-led organization with 39 member organizations representing 53 institutions, the BCC promotes and supports the application of free and open-source digital archives tools and practices in libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations.

2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the BitCurator Consortium. As we take a moment to celebrate our achievements from the past 10 years, we also take a step back to reflect on our journey so far.

How have things changed?

  • How has your practice changed? (i.e., shifting away from digital forensics to other methods of transfer and acquisition)
  • How have you faced the challenges of working with born-digital material in the cloud?
  • How  do you make the decision to use AI and machine learning in your work?
  • How have the existential issues facing digital archives changed and how has that changed your work?

Lessons learned?

  • How are you working to reevaluate past work and reflect on your failures and successes?
  • How do you measure your successes and failures?
  • How are you incorporating changes into your existing workflows?

Where do we go from here?

  • How do we sustain and foster a healthy community of practice?
  • How do you achieve buy-in and support for your work?
  • How to onboard folks new to the field of digital archives?

The BCC Forum Committee recognizes that the field of digital archives is broad and diverse, and accepts proposals that focus on any related topic from any areas of interest. We particularly encourage proposals to consider the themes mentioned above.

The Forum Committee welcomes participation from organizations and individuals working outside of academic and special collections libraries and archives, members from BIPOC communities, students, and new professionals.

The BitCurator Forum is open to all. You do not need to be a BCC member or BitCurator user to submit a proposal and/or attend the event. See examples of past Forum presentations here.

Deadlines

  • Submission Deadline: Friday, November 17
  • Acceptance Notification: Friday, December 8
  • Speaker confirmation/changes: Friday, December 22
  • Program Posted: Week of January 8

Session Types

The Forum Committee encourages participant-focused session formats that incorporate interactivity. This can include any type of non-traditional session format, such as peer-to-peer learning sessions, collaborative working sessions, roundtables, goal-oriented hack-a-thons, etc

Demos / How-to’s

Sessions facilitated by individuals or groups are welcome. 60 minutes

Please submit a 250-word (maximum) abstract describing the session format and topic(s), as well as learning objectives if applicable.

These sessions are intended to replace workshops and have a broad audience, but serve as an opportunity to share workflows or demonstrate a new tool or process you are working on or have used at your institution.

To encourage participation and access for all attendees, these sessions will not have registration limits.

Panels Presentations or Short Papers

Panel: 40 minutes

Short Papers: 20 minutes

Please submit a 250-word (maximum) abstract. If submitting a short paper, individual panelists may be matched by the BCC Forum Committee based on the complementarity of subjects or overarching themes. 

We encourage presentations to move beyond the case study (see Lightning Talks for this format) and address pressing issues, best practices, opportunities for collaboration, visions, and expanded uses for digital archives in libraries, archives, museums, and beyond. The Forum Committee strongly encourages proposals from underrepresented groups, and/or those that feature the perspectives of a variety of roles — including students — organizations, or fields. For group presentations, we strongly discourage proposals from all white male presenters. We particularly welcome alternative panel formats that will facilitate engagement, including group discussions.

Lightning Talks

1 presenter, 5 minutes

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words.

Lightning talks are a great format for case studies, digital archives “success stories” or “tales of woe,” research updates, and short demos or how-tos.

BitCurator Satellites and Other Formats

Other types of formats can be proposed, and we welcome formats that incorporate in-person elements.

This year we again encourage community members to host BitCurator Satellites, local on-site events held in conjunction with the online BitCurator Forum. This is an experimental hybrid conference model, intended to complement the online BitCurator Forum by supporting partners and friends so they can host sessions, workshops and talks for a local audience. Here are some examples of events from 2023.

A call for satellite hosts will be sent out later this fall.

All sessions will be hosted live on Zoom. Final time length of sessions may be adjusted in the final program. The Forum Committee will communicate any changes about this with speakers as early as possible.

CFP: Archiving 2024

The focus of Archiving 2024 is Science, Sustainability, Security.

2024 PROGRAM TOPICS

Authors are invited to submit a minimum 2-page abstract (not including references and bio) using the Archiving Submission Template as a base (all sections MUST be addressed) for peer-review describing original work in technical areas related to 2D, 3D, and AV materials.  Papers may also address business and cost models; collaborations and partnerships; best practices, lessons learned, and case studies. Submissions are welcome in, but not limited to, the following areas:

Digitization / Imaging

  • New developments in digitization technologies and workflows
  • Advanced imaging techniques and image processing, e.g., multispectral imaging, 3D imaging, software
  • Large scale/mass digitization and workflow management systems
  • Quality assurance and control of digitization workflow, e.g., data, targets, software, automation, integration

Preservation / Archiving

  • Standards and guidelines for secure and sustainable preservation and archiving methods
  • Management of metadata, formats, specifications, and systems
  • Archival and preservation models and workflows
  • Techniques for analyzing and processing collections at scale

Access / Presentation

  • Dissemination/use of digitized/imaged materials, e.g., rights management, crowdsourcing, data mining, data visualization
  • Deep learning algorithms to improve search results; AI, machine learning, etc.
  • Data visualization and automated programming interface
  • Open access and open data strategies
  • Integration of linked open data and source solutions

Management and Assessment

  • Sustainability in archiving and digitization
  • Policies, strategies, plans, and risk management; repository assessment
  • Work models: adaptation and opportunities in a hybrid model
  • Remote collaboration and hybrid work

In recognition of some continued limitations within lab and in-person environments, we will still consider a selection of submissions that may be more focused on significant updates or additions to existing projects or projects in progress; lessons learned are also welcome, including approaches that turned out to be less than optimal (lessons of what not to do).

All papers presented at Archiving 2024 are published Open Access. For reference, papers from past Archiving conferences are published on the IS&T Digital Library/Archiving.

PEER REVIEW PROCESS AND PUBLICATION

All submitted proposals are peer-reviewed to ensure that the program provides significant, timely, and authoritative information. 

  • Papers presented at the conference should be complete in regard to advancing the state of knowledge in the area of cultural heritage archiving.
  • All papers presented at Archiving 2024 are published Open Access in the conference proceedings, indexed with various services, filed with the US Library of Congress, and made available as downloadable PDFs through the IS&T Digital Library. Authors may also post the authoritative version of accepted papers in repositories and on websites.
  • Authors are expected to adhere to the guidelines and ethics found in the IS&T Publication Policy .
  • To help support free access to manuscripts, a paid conference registration is required for each paper presented.
  • The conference language is English.

How to Submit

Prospective authors are encouraged to review all the details below, as well as the IS&T Publication Policy.

Authors have the option to submit either a traditional conference paper, which will be published in the Archiving proceedings, or a Journal-first paper, which appears in the journal prior to the meeting start date, and as a reprint in the Archiving proceedings, giving the author a journal citation. Journal-first is available for the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology (JIST) or the Journal of Perceptual Imaging (JPI).

JOURNAL-FIRST PAPER

Submit via: jist.msubmit.net OR jpi.msubmit.net
Submission Deadline: 15 Nov 2023
Submission Format: Standard-length, publication-ready paper
Review Format: Standard journal peer-review

Why Journal-First?

  • Gain an Open Access journal citation, plus conference presentation.
  • Guaranteed presentation slot if accepted with minor revisions. Papers requiring major revisions may or may not have a speaking slot depending on timing.
  • Fast-tracked review.

Visit the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology or the Journal of Perceptual Imaging pages for more details on how to submit to the journal of your choice. 

Initial decisions and requests for revision, if required, will be sent to authors by 10 January. Final papers are due by 29 February 2024, following the final decision letter.

Submit JIST-first

Submit JPI-first

Upon acceptance of papers, authors will pay page charges and register for Archiving per the individual journal’s requirements. Rejected papers will be reviewed for possible inclusion in Archiving using the conference submission criteria.

Final papers are due by 29 February 2024.

Questions? Contact us at either jist@imaging.org or jpi@imaging.org

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS PAPER*

Prospective authors are encouraged to review all the details below, as well as the IS&T Publication Policy .

Submit: Archiving Submission Site
Submission Deadline: 20 December 2023
Submission Format: minimum 2-page extended abstract (excluding bio and references) using the Archiving Submission Template (MS Word)
Review Format: Peer-review

REQUIREMENTS

  • Extended abstract (minimum 2-pages of content excluding references and bio) describing original work in any technical areas related to the program topics. This may include updates to existing projects or projects in progress, as well as completed projects.
  • Only abstracts submitted according to the IS&T guidelines and template will be considered.
  • The abstract should clearly explain the technical content, including how the material is new or distinct from previously presented/published work on the same topic, or whether it is an update or addition to previous work. Submission may also include “lessons learned”, approaches that turned out to be less than optimal that can be shared as learning experiences of what not to do. The paper may speculate on how your research ideas will impact the field in the future.
  • List primary author and all co-authors with a maximum 50-word bio for each.
  • Provide complete contact info (address, phone, e-mail) for the primary author.
  • Agree to register for the conference and present the paper during the technical program as scheduled.
  • Agree to submit a final paper by 4 March 2024, if accepted. While IS&T encourages 4-6 page proceedings papers, we also accept 1-2 page extended abstracts. Extended abstracts are provided to registrants, but not posted with the Archiving Proceedings in the IS&T Digital Library.

PRESENTATION FORMAT

  • Authors may request a 20-minute oral presentation (includes Q&A) or 40-minute interactive poster session presentation format; both are considered of equal value, importance, and merit.
  • The interactive poster option enables presenters to engage with other conference delegates and get more feedback during an interactive poster session.  

DECISION NOTIFICATION

Final decisions on acceptance and presentation format (oral or interactive poster paper) are at the discretion of the Technical Program Committee. Notices of acceptance will be sent 16 January 2024. 

Upon notice of acceptance, authors are sent detailed instructions for submitting the revised 1-2 page extended abstract for inclusion in the final program to registrants, or the full text of the final 4-6 page paper for publication in the conference proceedings, including forms for “transfer of copyright,” which includes CC-BY and government employee options. Please note that each author is responsible for obtaining appropriate clearance as necessary.

Final papers and extended abstracts are due 4 March 2024.

Questions?  Contact arch-papers@imaging.org

Submit Now

Call for Papers: The Business of Music Symposium 2024

Call for Papers

The Business of Music Symposium 2024
Charles H. Templeton, Sr. Ragtime & Jazz Festival
Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS

Wednesday and Thursday, February 21-22, 2024 

Mississippi State University Libraries is pleased to announce the second annual Business of Music Symposium to be held as part of the 18th Annual Charles H. Templeton, Sr. Ragtime & Jazz Festival. The Symposium will take place on Wednesday and Thursday, February 21-22, and the Ragtime Festival will follow on February 22-24, 2024.

The Symposium is a free multidisciplinary gathering that aims to encourage and support research and scholarship on topics related to the Charles H. Templeton, Sr. “Business of Music” Collection at the Mitchell Memorial Library on the campus of Mississippi State University. 

The Templeton Collection focuses on music business during the Ragtime era (1890-1930), but paper proposals may cover any era of the sheet music and recording industries. The Templeton Music Collection includes approximately 20,000 pieces of sheet music, over 200 instruments, 2,000 cylinders and 14,000 flat discs. More information about the collection, as well as digitized material from the collections, is available here: https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/charles-h-templeton/

The first day of the symposium will be in-person; the second day will be reserved for virtual presentations. Submissions are now open for proposals for individual presentations and panels. Presentations based on research conducted using the Templeton Collections are encouraged, although use of the collections is not a requirement for acceptance.

Possible topics include:

  • Careers of individual singers, composers, or people otherwise involved in creating music
  • Role and impact of individual publishing houses or record labels
  • Art and design themes of sheet music and record sleeve covers
  • Approaches to teaching with sheet music
  • Intersections of art, design, and commerce: musical instruments and machines as home décor
  • Music and advances in recording and playback technology
  • Issues of race, gender, class, and ethnicity in the sheet music and recording industries

Please submit an abstract (with title) of no more than 300 words and a brief professional bio to msstate.libwizard.com/f/BusinessofMusic2024 by November 15, 2023. Pre-selected panels of 3-4 presenters are welcome; individual presentations will be assembled into panels by the program committee. Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes and complete panels should not exceed 60 minutes. Please also indicate if you are able to present virtually, in-person, or both and if you would like your presentation to be recorded and/or streamed.

We welcome proposals from scholars at all stages of their professional and academic careers.

Chip and Connie Templeton Research Scholarship

The Chip and Connie Templeton Scholarship, which is $500 to be applied towards the costs of presenting at the Symposium, will once again be offered for the 2024 Symposium. To apply, please complete the scholarship entry form at https://msstate.libwizard.com/f/BusinessofMusic2024_Scholarship and include your name, affiliation, proposed session title, and a brief summary (not more than 500 words) on how the funds would positively affect your participation in the symposium. Deadline for applications for the scholarship is November 15, 2023. While the use of the Templeton Collection is not a requirement of the award, preference is given to scholars who have utilized the collection in their research.

About the Charles H. Templeton Ragtime and Jazz Festival

The Charles Templeton, Sr. Ragtime & Jazz Festival is sponsored by the MSU Libraries and the Charles Templeton Sr. Music Museum as a means of enhancing the research in the area of ragtime music, increasing the awareness of the Templeton collection housed in the MSU Library and introducing people to the sounds of Ragtime being performed by world-renowned ragtime musicians.

The festival is comprised of a blend of major concerts, mini-concerts, seminars and tours of the Music Museum. Seminars are held in Mitchell Memorial Library and major concerts are held at the Bettersworth Auditorium in Lee Hall on the MSU Campus. For more information about the festival visit http://festival.library.msstate.edu. 

CFP: Feminist Media Histories – Special Issue on Gender, Media, and DevelopmentalismCFP:

Guest Editors: Dalila Missero & Masha Salazkina 

With this special issue of Feminist Media Histories we invite contributions that explore the historical role of gender within media production explicitly engaged in developmentalist projects. As an ideological and political framework, developmentalism became especially prominent between the 1950s and the 1990s to conceptualize, discuss, and tackle global inequality. Based on the certainty that economic growth inevitably leads to social progress and modernization, it has been a dominant paradigm driving state and inter-governmental support for various institutional media projects, especially in the context of Asia, Africa, and Latin America on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In a more latent way, developmentalist discourses and representational regimes—as well as their critiques—have also been central to much film and media production in these regions, from radical, grassroots, or independent media collectives to commercial filmmaking. With the inauguration of the United Nations Decade of Women (1975-1985), the issue of gender inequality became increasingly central in developmentalist debates and policies, in tandem with and in response to the agenda of the international women’s movement. Media representations and infrastructures have played a key role in shaping these intersecting processes in a way that remains to be fully explored in media history.  

Analysis of developmentalist media, especially with regards to questions of gender, are also in continuity with post-colonial and intersectional inquiry across and beyond film and media studies. The rejection of the basic tenets of developmentalism embedded in the colonial matrix of power (key among them universalism and the belief in economic indicators as a measure of progress) form the core of the decolonial critique, which emerged around the same period. The status of indigeneity as a distinct epistemological  position, political project, and a way of life likewise stands in sharp conflict with developmentalist projects promoted by states and international institutions intended to  overcome “underdevelopment.” Bringing these perspectives together, decolonial feminism’s attention to patriarchal, misogynistic, and homophobic tensions at work in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles has foregrounded intersectional forms of oppression and shifted the locus of knowledge production to the concrete experiences of women’s struggles across the Global South, with indigenous women often offering the most compelling alternatives to the dominant epistemological paradigms.  

Investigating media projects that resulted from the inevitably contradictory intersection of global developmentalist politics (which have increasingly focused on women and indigenous communities) and on-the-ground women’s movements in Asia, Africa, and  Latin America therefore presents a particularly productive area of transnational decolonial feminist media scholarship. Such gendered understandings and narratives of developmentalism, diverse venues of media production, circulation and reception  advancing these notions, and local and transnational responses to them, however, have certainly not been limited to the recent decades. Research on the broader history of  intersections of gender, media, and developmentalism is yet to be integrated within feminist media historiographies. 

To this end, this special issue seeks to foster new knowledge and develop shared theoretical and methodological frameworks for exploring this topic. We welcome scholarship on different types of media (film, television, radio, digital media, etc), situated within a wide historical period, and from a variety of geographic and geopolitical positions. Contributions may focus on specific case studies as well as on broader methodological and theoretical questions. Possible topics include: 

  • Representations of gender, indigeneity, coloniality, and global inequality in developmentalist media 
  • Feminist (mediated) responses to developmentalism 
  • Queer and trans activism and developmentalist media 
  • Developmentalist media and social, political, and anti-colonial movements
  • Differences and similarities in gender politics of developmentalism across the Cold War divides and their corresponding media forms and ideologies 
  • Archives, counter-archives, technologies, and infrastructures of developmentalist media  
  • Developmentalism and mediated representations of the future 
  • Institutions and agencies (United Nations, UNESCO, the World Bank) as well as governments and NGOs as production sites of media content on gender and  development  
  • Developmentalism in the context of contemporary sustainability and environmental programs (i.e., SDG 2030 agenda), and its intersections with today’s ecofeminist movements and digital media practices 
  • Comparative and/or transnational studies of developmentalism and media

Interested contributors should contact guest editors Dalila Missero and Masha Salazkina directly, sending a 500-word proposal and a short bio no later than February  1, 2024 to d.missero@lancaster.ac.uk and salazkina.masha@gmail.com; contributors will be notified by March 1, 2024; article drafts will be due by October 1, 2024 and will then be sent out for peer review.

Contact Information
Yumo Yan, Managing Editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal

Contact Email
yy2887@uw.edu

URL: https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/pages/cfp

CFP: 2024 Oral History Australia Biennial Conference

Call for Presentations

Deadline  1 April 2024

Oral history can be powerful in so many ways. Interviews generate potent emotions. Recordings capture the power of voice as well as the power of silence. Multimedia productions engage and connect new audiences with the complexities of the past.

Fundamentally, oral history transforms the historical archive and challenges mainstream histories. It can shift traditional power dynamics, bring forth new voices and perspectives, reshape policies and politics, and shake up old certainties.

Yet those possibilities come with risk as well as reward. Recording sensitive subjects is never easy. Creating an oral history production takes time, skill and care, and sometimes goes wrong. Imaginative re-uses of oral history recordings can raise ethical and legal complexities. And oral histories that disrupt accepted narratives can generate pain and conflict, in families, communities and nations.

Our conference welcomes participants who use oral history in their work across the many fields and disciplines that contribute to community, professional and academic histories. We welcome presenters from Victoria and around Australia, from across the Tasman and throughout the oral history world, from First Nations and culturally diverse backgrounds. We invite proposals for individual presentations, workshops, performances and thematic panels that speak to The Power of Oral History– Risks, Rewards and Possibilities.

Join us in Melbourne in November 2024 for a celebration of the power of oral history. Our conference venue is the state-of-the-art Trinity College Gateway Centre on the campus of the University of Melbourne, in inner city Parkville, close to cafes, restaurants, parks, public transport and accommodation. The venue is accessible with a dedicated lift.

On Thursday 21 November oral history training workshops will be followed by the conference welcome reception in the evening. The main conference will be on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 of November, and on Sunday 24 participants may enjoy a variety of history tours in Melbourne and Victoria.

Conference sub-themes

Conference sub-themes may include, but are not limited to:

  • Indigenous oral histories and oral traditions
  • Oral history, culture and language
  • Interpreting memory in oral history
  • Transgressing boundaries with oral history
  • Documenting diverse voices with oral history
  • Histories of protest, activism and rights
  • Contested memories and histories
  • Oral histories of working lives and social class
  • Migrant and refugee history
  • Gender and oral history
  • LGBTIQA+ oral histories
  • Ethical issues in oral history
  • Technology and oral history
  • Archiving and oral history
  • Giving voice to history through music
  • Oral histories of family, community or place
  • Creative uses of oral history recordings
  • Oral history in galleries, libraries and museums

Requirements

All proposals to present at the conference must be submitted using the conference EasyChair submission portal (see below) no later than 1 April 2024.

We welcome proposals for presentations in a variety of formats and media, including standard paper presentations (typically 20 minutes); short ‘lightning’ accounts of work in progress (typically 5 minutes); participatory workshops; performances; or thematic panels comprising several presenters. Presentations should involve oral history. Contact the Chair of the Conference Program Committee, Professor Alistair Thomson, (alistair.thomson@monash.edu) if you would like to discuss the format or focus of your presentation before you submit it.

Proposals for presentations / papers / panels / posters should be no more than 200 words (single space, 12 point font in Times New Roman) and must include at the top of the page, your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), postal address, phone number and email address, the title for your presentation/panel, the sub-theme/s your work best connects to, and the presentation format (standard 20 minute paper; 5 minute ‘lightning’ account of work in progress; thematic panel; performance; or participatory workshop).

Presenters will be encouraged to submit papers to the refereed, online Oral History Australia journal, Studies in Oral History.

Submission

New proposals should be uploaded to EasyChair via this link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=oha2024.

To use this online conference management system, you will need to create an author account (a simple process that we have used in previous conferences) and then submit your proposal by uploading it as a PDF document (with full details as listed above).

If you are unfamiliar with EasyChair, please follow the instructions available via a downloadable PDF available at: https://oralhistoryaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/OHA_conference_2024_EasyChair-instructions.pdf.

If you are unable to use this system, please email your proposal as a PDF attachment to ohavictoria2024@gmail.com.

Further information

In launching this website we are also inviting submissions for Presentations. Go to our Call for Presentations to find out more about the conference theme and the guidelines for submitting a proposal.

For conference information or to join the conference mailing list, email our Oral History Victoria hosts at: ohavictoria2024@gmail.com.

CFP: Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region

Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region [edited collection]

Under advance contract with Louisiana State University Press
Editors: Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison
Proposals (500 words): November 1, 2023
Completed Chapters (7,000 words): March 15, 2024

As the double meaning of our title suggests, this collection intends “record, document, archive” as a triad of both verbs and nouns. Record, Document, Archive seeks projects investigating processes that record, document, or archive “event in place and time” as well as projects examining artifacts themselves, those records, documents, and archives that evince various souths within the region. Through examining the technologies and traces of recording, documenting, and archiving the U.S. South across disciplines and historical context, this collection asks what it means for the region to be both defined and imagined as a place of documentation.

In particular we welcome contributions that engage with processes and products that are im/material, un/documented, un/collected, or more-than-/human. We invite a wide temporal and disciplinary array of studies on, in, or about multiple iterations and scales of the South (American, Hemispheric, Global, U.S.): whether in recorded time (e.g., archival or media studies), time immemorial (e.g., Indigenous studies), and/or deep time (e.g., geology). 

Guiding questions might include:

  • What un/recorded, un/documented, or un/archived souths exist within or beyond hegemonic concepts? 
  • Within what constitutive or erasing systems have records, documents, and/or archives emerged or endured? 
  • How is “region” a humanist heuristic, one that scholars have perhaps reverse-engineered in our methodologies (broadly defined)? 
  • What alternate ways of knowing the region emerge when earth, life, and information sciences are brought in conversation with southern studies? 
  • What can documentary arts tell us about the dialectics of seeing as they apply to the region? 
  • What do archives cataloged as “southern” reveal about the limits of colonial and capitalist knowledge regimes of nation? 
  • What does the archive, as a collection of documents, a set of practices, and an institution, illuminate about the formation and continued domination of certain ways of understanding the South? 
  • How might the archive (broadly conceived) be a site for reclamation, narrative storytelling, ancestral recalling, and historical revisioning? 
  • How have queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies called into question southern archives or necessitated new documentary practices?

We encourage submissions that challenge Eurocentric documenting practices in disciplines with hegemonic legacies – such as studies in U.S. history, archive, anthropology, geography, literature, and media, and we prioritize scholarship from interdisciplinary approaches such as Indigenous, diasporic, transnational, queer, and environmental studies, among others. We especially welcome contributions interrogating un/documentation and immigration in context of what John-Michael Rivera calls in Undocuments (2021) “the spectral logic of undocumentality” (9). Contributions that engage with “un/documenting” in the broadest sense – conceptually, materially, organically, politically, bureaucratically, technologically, and otherwise – are highly encouraged.

Other Possible Topics Include: 

  • Artifacts and relics (im/material or un/collected); un/written or un/recorded correspondence; oral histories; etc.
  • Archival collection development, acquisitions, and access (copyright, paywalls, open access)
  • Activism in archival studies, museum studies, and information sciences; “liberatory memory work”; community archives
  • Indigenous archives and counter-archives, Indigenous data sovereignty, Indigenous earthworks
  • Undocumented souths and southerners
  • Geological or ecological formations that complicate dominant notions of “the South” or “southern”
  • Lost, erased, ephemeral, speculative or contested archives
  • Ecologies of the archive, the archive as an ecosystem, documenting climate change in the South, archive as conservation, archival migration/assemblage
  • Social and psychological acts of collecting, the emotional and affectual labor of documentary work, ethical and practical issues of curation
  • Digital documentary practices in the South
  • Diverse forms of documentary arts, including but not limited to television, feature and short documentaries, audio recordings, documentary photography and other audiovisual archives about the South
  • Data recovery and digital restoration, archive hacking
  • Recording corporeal testimonies and trauma, the body as archive
  • Disability justice, medical recordkeeping, accessibility issues, the archive as a space of resistance (i.e. the reclamation of knowledge systems, ontologies, and identities structured by disability)
  • Documentary as activism: feminist, trans*, and queer archives in the South, Civil Rights archives, labor archives, documenting the BLM movement, documenting environmental racism
  • Fake archives, mockumentaries, forgery and fabrication, hoaxes, archival appropriation
  • Interactive archives, documentary performances
  • Legal and financial documents, documenting evidence; contracts, policy memos, public records, and balance sheets as archive
  • Official government and/or historical records or recording systems 
  • Memorials and monuments, artifacts and material histories, museums, archival sites and spaces
  • Pedagogies of archival research
  • The role of literature in cataloging, archiving, remembering, and documenting, the memoir as documentary, auto-ethnography
  • Unruly or accidental archives, radical or revolutionary recordkeeping, anarchives, living archives

500-word proposals should be sent to Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison at Record.Document.Archive@gmail.com by November 1, 2023. Please also direct any questions about possible submission topics to this email.

For those asked to contribute to the collection, completed essays of approximately 7,000 words will be due by March 15, 2024. Submissions from both established and emerging scholars are welcomed, as is work from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Anticipated publication year is 2025.

Contact Information
Stephanie Rountree (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor of English
University of North Georgia

Contact Email: Record.Document.Archive@gmail.com

CFP: Studies in Oral History

Studies in Oral History, Issue No. 46, 2024

Joint Editors: Skye Krichauff and Carla Pascoe Leahy

Working Lives & Workplaces

Peer-reviewed articles

Contributions are invited from Australia and overseas for the peer-reviewed articles section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History, the journal of Oral History Australia (OHA).

This special issue will explore oral histories of working lives, workplaces and work, all broadly defined to incorporate histories of volunteering, military service and other types of service. Papers that employ or interrogate oral history methodologies and illuminate aspects of working life, workplaces, and workplace culture are invited.

Contributions are invited across the following themes (though are not limited to these):

  • How the experience of work is mediated by gender, ethnicity, class, and generation
  • How technological innovation changed the nature of work
  • How workers have sought to protect their employment rights and conditions
  • Migrants’ experience of the workplace
  • Occupational health and safety
  • Multi-generations of families working at the same workplace
  • Unfree work
  • Work and the environment
  • Workplace closures, redundancies and lay-offs.

As all articles are subject to anonymous peer review, pleasure ensure your submission contains no identifying material. Articles submitted to the Oral History Australia Editorial Board for peer review will first be assessed for suitability by the Editorial Board. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Journal Style Guide for further information.

Word limits and deadlines

To be considered for peer review, articles should be no more than 8000 words, including references. Publication of the issue is anticipated in late 2024.

Deadline for submissions: Friday 1 December 2023.

Submission

Send submissions to: Dr Alexandra Dellios, Chair, Oral History Australia Editorial Board, email editorialboard.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au.

Reports

Submissions are also invited for the reports section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History. Reports may describe oral history projects conducted by academic researchers, museum curators, heritage professionals, consulting historians, community historians and more. Projects may have resulted in public outcomes such as websites, exhibitions, podcasts, theses, articles or books. Please note the reports section is not peer-reviewed; notes from the field, updates on exciting new work, or reflections on the process and/or outcomes of oral history projects are encouraged. Reports which relate to the issue theme of ‘Working Lives and Workplaces’ are welcome but not mandatory.

Word limit: 1,500 words.

Deadline for report submissions: Monday 30 April 2023.

Please send reports to Alexandra Mountain, Reports Editor of Studies in Oral History, reports.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au

Please note that while the reports are not peer-reviewed, we cannot accept all reports for publication and accepted reports will need to be edited for length, clarity and adherence to the Style Guide. Reports will be selected on the basis of quality of writing, the diversity of oral history perspectives showcased across the reports section and relevance to the special issue theme. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Style Guide for further information.

Call for Proposals: AI in OH Online Symposium

AI in OH: How New and Evolving Technologies Will Impact the Profession

Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has pervaded our shared discourse and lexicon. Myriad organizations and sectors are at once hurriedly embracing and cautiously considering the impacts large language models and complex algorithms might have on their industries. Oral history is not immune to AI’s influence, and in certain cases the profession might already hold extant examples of its effects on practice.

For this online symposium, OHA invites oral history practitioners and scholars from all disciplines who utilize oral history in their work to submit paper or roundtable proposals detailing any number of intersections between artificial intelligence and oral history. Topics could include, but are not limited to:

  • Augmenting/Improving oral history workflows with AI tools
  • Impacts of utilizing oral histories for large language model training
  • Influences of AI in representations of racial/ethnic identity or racial power structures
  • Creative/Productive uses of oral history material via AI tools
  • Ethical considerations regarding AI behaviors or products
  • Ruminations on the future of the field in an AI-driven world

The symposium is tentatively set for the work week of July 15, 2024, with its ultimate timing/length determined by the strength of the submission field. Proposals may either be submitted as stand-alone papers/presentations, a panel of topically coherent papers/presentations, a roundtable centered around a central theme, or a two-hour workshop. Your proposal should include:

  • The title of each paper, presentation, and/or proposed panel/roundtable/workshop
  • An abstract of no more than 500 words for each individual paper/presentation/workshop, or a single abstract for a proposed roundtable
  • Name, affiliation, and email address for each prospective participant
  • A short bio of no more than 250 words for each prospective participant

For those looking to find fellow presenters for their panel, roundtable, or workshop idea, feel free to use OHA’s collaborative Google Doc for the symposium found HERE.

Submit your proposals within the OHA Symposium Portal by January 1st, 2024. If you have any questions about the submission process, please reach out to AI in OH program co-chairs Steven Sielaff (steven_sielaff@baylor.edu) & Sarah Milligan (sarah.milligan@okstate.edu).

Proposals will be reviewed by a program committee in early 2024, with applicants being informed of their acceptance or declination by March 1st, 2024. The full program will be released and registration for the symposium will open shortly thereafter. For future news and updates, please visit the official symposium website: https://oralhistory.org/ai

Contact Information

Steven Sielaff – Associate Director, Oral History Association

Contact Email

Steven_Sielaff@baylor.edu

URL

AI in OH Virtual Symposium (July 2024)

CfP (Special Issue): Culturally-Specific Museums and Archives: Between Diasporic Culture and Australian Heritage

Call for Papers

Culturally-Specific Museums and Archives: Between Diasporic Culture and Australian Heritage

To migrant communities in Australia and their descendants, dedicated archives and museums documenting culturally-specific material and experiences have been significant spaces for activism, integration, reflexion and community identity. These archives and museums first emerged in the 1950s and 60s, possibly fulfilling similar roles to community associations. Some may have been inspired by a growing interest in local Australian history at this time when many historical societies in regional areas were established; others adopted a more explicitly activist role, viewing their diaspora and its cultural maintenance as a form of opposition to homeland political developments. These early museums and archives include the Estonian Archives in Australia (Sydney, 1952), Lobethal Archives and Historical Museum (Loebethal, 1956), Lithuanian Museum (Adelaide, 1961), Jindera Pioneer Museum and Historical Society (Jindera, 1968), Latvian Museum, (Adelaide, 1970), Ukrainian Museum (Adelaide, 1979), and the Jewish Museum of Australia (Melbourne, 1982).

After the introduction of multicultural policies from the 1970s onwards—in response to grassroots activism emanating from the migrant rights movement and ethnic welfare societies—local and state governments have also funded culturally specific museums as a part of tourism initiatives, particularly in culturally specific precincts, including the Museum of Chinese Australian History (Melbourne, 1984) and the Museo Italiano (Melbourne, 2010), which grew from Co.As.It. Italian Historical Society. At other times, policies around social cohesion in the wake of major events like September 11, 2001 led to the funding of culturally specific museums by Federal and State governments, such as the Islamic Museum of Australia (Melbourne, 2014).

A great deal has been written on the question of community engagement and cultural diversity in museums, as well as diasporic heritage and memory in the Australian context (Szekeres 2011; Darian-Smith and Hamilton 2019; Dellios and Henrich 2021; Kornfeld 1997; Witcomb 2013). The special edition of Humanities Research edited by Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi in 2009, for example, was instrumental in thinking critically about the tensions between multiculturalism, pluralism, and the dictates of national cohesiveness in Australian museums. It was in this context of inquiry that further attention started to be paid to culturally-specific museums and archives, with seminal contributions documenting their history in Australia and the specific place they hold in the museum landscape (Viv Szekeres 2011; Light 2016). Conversations about migrant heritage, however, has remained primarily focused on state-funded museums, often overlooking how these dynamics unfold within community-operated, culturally-specific museums and archives.

We are seeking contributions about culturally-specific museums and archives in Australia, the social roles they have played for migrant and diasporic communities in Australia and beyond, the multilayered identities they promote, their relationship to multiculturalism (as a prescriptive policy framework and as a descriptor of the social milieu), as well as the opportunities and the challenges they represent for the communities that operate them. We are also interested in contributions that examine their relations to local government, state and national museums, libraries and archives dedicated to social history in Australia, exploring differences and similarities in terms of curatorial practices (collecting, preserving and exhibiting), community engagement and institutional features.

Questions underlying this special edition include:

  • How and why did culturally-specific museums and archives emerge in Australia?
  • What do museums or archives have to offer to migrant/diaspora communities in Australia that other means of representations do not?
  • How can culturally-specific museums and archives act as both cultural repositories and dynamic spaces to continue national, transnational, and cross-cultural imagining?
  • To what extent do culturally-specific museums and archives share in a common discourse of interculturality, or alternatively, respond to localised debates and frames of reference?
  • How specific is museum and archival practice in a culturally-specific/community-operated museum?
  • What engagement have culturally-specific museums and archives make with First Nations’ heritage and experiences?
  • How have culturally-specific museums and archives handled relationships with the governments of their places of origin, which can include being involved with Australia’s diplomatic relations with those governments?

Interested participants, please submit your abstract by 20 December to Dr. Virginie Rey at virginie.rey@deakin.edu.au; cc Dr Alexandra Dellios alexandra.dellios@anu.edu.au and Dr Karen Schamberger at kschamberger@nla.gov.au

Contact Information

Contact Email: alexandra.dellios@anu.edu.au

Rejoinder Call for Submissions — The Archival is Political

The Archival is Political

This issue of Rejoinder addresses the power and politics of the archive as an object of fascination for feminist/queer scholars and activists. Carolyn Steedman states that “you find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities” (2002, 45), while Gracen Brilmyer argues that archives are assemblages of “people, places, policies, attitudes, environments, and materials across time” (2018, 98). At the same time that archives can be sites of radical hope for the preservation of the histories of women, queer folks, people of color, and otherwise marginalized groups, they are also institutions that have historically enacted immense violence. As Saidiya Hartman asks: “is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?” (2008, 11). In other words, what is the past, present, and future of feminist and queer archival practice?

We invite interdisciplinary submissions that address the “archival turn” in feminist and queer studies. Submissions may include essays, commentary, criticism, fiction, poetry, and artwork from any discipline. We particularly welcome work that connects archival practice to activism, whether this be archival collections focused on activist history or archival collection as a political project for historical redress. Other topics may include digital archives, fictional archives, archival silences and violence, archival management, and information sciences. Together these contributions will reflect the contradictions of, and aspirations for, feminist and queer archives.

For manuscript preparation details, please see our website at: https://irw.rutgers.edu/about-rejoinder. Rejoinder is published by the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University in partnership with The Feminist Art Project.

This special issue of Rejoinder will be edited by Alexandra Southgate (Temple University). Please send completed written work (2,000-2,500 words max), jpegs of artwork, and short bios to irw@sas.rutgers.edu with “Rejoinder Submission” in the subject line by December 15, 2023.