Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Archiving Blackness: Reimagining And Recreating The Archive(S) As Literary And Information Wake Work, Jamillah R. Gabriel

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

“…we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake.”

– Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (2016)

In this paper, I introduce Christina Sharpe’s conceptualizations of wake and wake work, as they pertain to archiving the experiences of Blackness to better understand how the archive and archives are vital for those living and working in the wake of slavery. I am particularly interested in the wake work conducted both in literary works (speculative fiction) and at information sites (archives). To that end, …

Archivists And Time: Conceptions Of Time And Long-Term Information Preservation Among Archivists, Reine Rydén

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The issue of preserving information about nuclear waste for an extremely long period of time raises questions about ways to transmit knowledge to future generations. There is an ongoing discussion about the design of a message and the sustainability of different storage media. Information preservation in the really long term is, however, only partly a matter of technology; it is just as much about thought patterns. Since the work of archivists plays a key role, it is important to find out how archivists think about time and whether they have more developed conceptions of time and the future than other …