Call for Papers

"Democratizing Knowledge: Examining Archives in the Post-custodial Era"

A virtual conference hosted by Drew University | Saturday, November 7th,
2020

To acknowledge the archive as a construct is to understand that power, as
Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, “is constitutive of the story.” Yet, for
too long historians have operated as if the archive were a foregone
conclusion, ignoring the ways in which history is a narrative shaped as
profoundly by omission as by any material presence.



Trouillot is but one of a number of contemporary theorists who’ve challenged
inherited archival practice, inspiring new approaches to the archive’s
construction. The present post-custodial mode, for example, promises a more
collaborative approach, giving voice to those previously silenced by
institutional power. Community access to and participation in the archive
is prioritized, precluding institutional intervention. Archivists and
librarians, among them, Michelle Caswell, Chaitra Powell, Mario H. Ramirez,
Samantha Winn, and Jarrett Drake, have produced vital scholarship centered
on representation, marginalization, and power in the archive, advancing
essential dialogues that will inform future archival praxis and the
responsible safeguarding of our collective past.

The eighth annual Dean Hopper Conference seeks to bring into
conversation historians,
theorists, curators, archivists and collection managers from across a range
of disciplines to discuss past practice and imagine novel approaches to the
archive. Thinking through the archive, broadly conceived, we ask the
following: what is the future of archives? How might new archival practices
foster more equitable distribution of resources? Should digital technology
be more central to archives and material culture collections, rather than
as a mere adjunct? What new risks threaten the production of history going
forward? This conference is planned for Saturday, November 7th, 2020 at
Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. A virtual platform is planned.

Keynote Speakers

Megan Rossman is assistant professor of communications at Purchase College
and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Rossman’s films have screened
at festivals including DOC NYC and Outfest. Her first feature-length film The
Archivettes, explores the founding and development of the Lesbian Herstory
Archives, the largest collection of materials by and about lesbians. The
project was awarded the prestigious Princess Grace Award.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is professor of modern culture and media at Brown
University. Azoulay’s research and latest book, Potential History:
Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), focuses on the potential history of
the archive, sovereignty, art, and human rights. Potential history, a
concept and an approach that she has developed over the last decade, has
far-reaching implications for the fields of political theory, archival
formations, and photography studies. Her books include: Civil Imagination:
The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012) and The Civil Contract
of Photography (Zone Books, 2008).

Deadline & Submissions

We invite proposals on this theme from graduate students, scholars, and
professionals across the humanities. Proposals for individual papers and
panels are welcome. Additionally, proposals for undergraduate poster
presentations, whether based on a faculty-directed project or individual
research, are also encouraged. Please send a 250-word abstract or a
proposed poster, as well as a brief biography to [log in to unmask] by August
24th. For panel proposals, please submit a 200 word panel abstract in
addition to individual paper abstracts.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to

   -

   History of archives and archival theory
   -

   Archives and the production of memory
   -

   Strengths and weaknesses of current archival practices
   -

   Identification and exploitation of narrative silences in the archive
   -

   Archival activism or the “interventionist” archivist
   -

   The future of digital archiving
   -

   “Alternative” archives (film, art, bodies, etc.)
   -

   Museums and archival practice
   -

   Public history and curation as archival practice
   -

   The social justice imperative in archival production
   -

   The archival processing of born-digital media
   -

   Archival networking and crowdsourcing
   -

   Archives of performance, oral history, music or sound, film, etc.
   -

   Landscape or architecture as archive

-- 
Sarah Churchill
PhD Candidate, Drew University
'Revolutionary Threads: The Mediation of Gender and Political Identity in
the ''New Irish Dance Costume''
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0424.12409>,
1917–1937'; *Gender & History*, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2018)

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