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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 …