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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Things That Work - Meditations On Materiality In Archival Discourse, Anneli Sundqvist
Things That Work - Meditations On Materiality In Archival Discourse, Anneli Sundqvist
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies
The renewal of archival theory since the 1990s has drawn upon the abstract and functional qualities of records, while their material aspects have been more or less excluded from theoretical discourse. Even if an emerging interest in materiality could be noticed, its impact and conceptual implications still need to be elucidated. This essay will explore the concept of materiality and how it has been dealt with in archival discourse, and discuss in what sense records could be regarded as material. It can be shown that while materiality is seldom explicitly addressed, it is an underlying theme in much archival discourse …
Summoning The Ghosts: Records As Agents In Community Archives, Jessica Tai, Jimmy Zavala, Joyce Gabiola, Gracen Brilmyer, Michelle Caswell
Summoning The Ghosts: Records As Agents In Community Archives, Jessica Tai, Jimmy Zavala, Joyce Gabiola, Gracen Brilmyer, Michelle Caswell
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies
Although records have traditionally been defined by their physical form, our research reveals that records documenting marginalized communities disrupt these limiting definitions by surfacing the ways that community members conceive of the agency of records. Based on focus groups we conducted with fifty-four community members at five different Southern California–based community archives, this paper examines how community archives users conceive of records as agents, embodied with the voices of past lives, and capable of facilitating meaning for those who access, activate, and interpret them. In our findings, users of community archives not only surfaced the notion of records as dynamic, …