disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 27: Archives

Call for Papers

Submission Deadline: December 1, 2017

http://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/call_for_papers.pdf 

The editorial collective of the open access journal, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, calls for submissions that explore “Archives” for an issue to be published summer 2018. As early as the 1970s when French philosopher Michel Foucault published The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language (1972), archives have undergone a conceptual shift from mere repositories of historical documents to representing processes of knowledge production and forms of social meaning. Two decades later, another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, contemplated the power and authority of archives in his Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996). Today, archives continue to receive attention from scholars in the social sciences and the humanities. From the archival memory-work of Karen Till (2005; 2008) and Caitlin DeSilvey (2007), to recent scholarship on (post-)colonial archives and tribal knowledge (Christen 2012; Caswell 2014), the topic of archives has come to occupy a central space in the discourses of a vast array of disciplines and approaches. In addition to providing new insights, these works also serve to question widely held institutional beliefs and practices. In this vein, we seek submissions that look at a range of archives, including national, personal, and community archives to investigate the ways in which documents, images, objects, and places serve various purposes and occupy different types of cultural, intellectual, and physical spaces. Possible topics may include:

• Archives in practice
• Bodies in archives / bodies as archives
• Participatory approaches to archives
• Community archives
• Archival methodology
• Digital archives
• Memory and archives
• Rhetoric of the archive
• Literary archives
• Art and archive
• Archives and (post-)colonialism
• Race, culture, and archives
• Silence and speaking / absence and presence
• Hauntings
• Queer and queering archives
• Affect and archives
• The future of archives

Additionally, submissions may explore memory institutions, broadly conceived, in order to touch on the constitution of libraries, museums, and universities, and their relation to social practice and theory. Finally, we welcome submissions that investigate archives and archival practices beyond the borders of the United States and outside of the global west.

More details can be found here: http://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/call_for_papers.pdf

Sources and Resources: Photography and Archives in Africa

Special issue of Critical Interventions

edited by Jürg Schneider, Marian Nur Goni, and Érika Nimis

Since the “discovery” of photography in Africa and photographs from Africa as sources for academic research or marketable goods on the international art market some 25 year ago, photo archives have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars, art dealers, artists and curators, who also act as resource persons and main intermediaries between the archives and the public. From the early 1990s on, various individuals from the global North have been ploughing the African continent, mainly focussing on early photo studios, in search of historical photographs which also engendered important material gains. Researchers working in and with photo collections of professional studio photographers, state press agencies, para state institutions and families have created from these sources an impressive though still incomplete corpus of scholarly work that touches on a great variety of topics such as biographies of early and contemporary African photographers or the various forms of photographic practices on the continent. Photo exhibitions and festivals in the North and South organized by a rather exclusive group of curators have mushroomed in recent years and so have exhibition catalogues and monographs. Not least, the last ten years have seen a number of projects that focussed on the digitization (and to a lesser extent material preservation) of photo collections in Sub-Saharan Africa with the common goal of conserving the visual heritage of the continent and making it accessible to a wider public. All this has had and still has a deep impact on the circulation, accessibility, perception and use of historical photographs from Africa. Likewise, all these activities have profoundly changed our understanding of photographs’ materiality, the ways how it is perceived, dealt with and addressed as well as the cultural and economic value that is attributed to them.

But not only was the photograph as the material, or after its digitization, immaterial carrier of visual information of the past affected by these activities but also the archive. Answering to changing societal processes and discourses, market logics and explicit or implicit policies with regard to access, reproduction and preservation photo archives are more than ever exposed to troubling dynamics of reconfiguration and profound transformations. New technological resources – the Internet, digitization and databases – have qualified the materiality of photo archives and challenge the boundaries between form and content. The archive has lost much of its status as a national or personal patrimony, but increasingly circulates “in global systems of loan, exchanges and markets” (Hall 2002, 337)*. What is more, photo archives, and the control over the inclusion, exclusion, circulation and access of and to the materials they hold, have now increasingly become tokens in a struggle for political, social or economic power and the formation of cultural and national identities.

Contributors to this special issue of Critical Interventions on Photography and Archives in Africa are invited to rethink in new terms all issues addressed above, based on the notions of sources (the photographic archive itself in all its forms) and resources (encompassing all of the persons, means and technological tools involved in the valorization of photographic archives), in order to offer new readings of these two key notions in this specific field of research.

* Hall, Martin. 2002. « Blackbirds and Black Butterflies. » In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michèle Pickover et al., Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 333-361.

Please submit your abstract by Sept. 1st, 2017 to: juerg.schneider@unibas.ch, m.nurgoni@gmail.com, and nimis.erika@uqam.ca

Submitted abstracts should be no longer than 500 words, and be sent as an attachment in Microsoft Word or PDF format.