236 LT -
"No documents, No history": Women, Archives, and History-Making
Saturday, June 3, 2017: 1:45 PM-3:15 PM
BRESL 209 (Hofstra University)
Organizer:
Deborah A Richards, Mount Holyoke College
Comment:
Jennifer S Tuttle, University of New England
Session Abstract
Like myriad social and activist movements, historical work on women, genders, and sexualities has illuminated the past and thereby changed the present, recovering the voices and lives of the invisible and the silenced, troubling analytical categories, and revealing the contingencies among sexuality, gender, race, class, and embodiment. This scholarship has constituted a form of activism allied with the succession of women’s and other liberatory movements of the past fifty years. Archives containing materials pertaining to the lives of women and gender/sexual minorities have been essential to this work, yet too often, as Gabrielle Dean has argued, the “primal scene” of archival research, “a dream of perfect union between researcher and source,” overlooks “all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor . . . the current project depends” (Dean, “Disciplinarity and Disorder”). This lightening session opens a conversation between historians and the archivists and other library professionals whose largely invisible labor enables and shapes this research—and who share with historians the work of activism, intellectual collaboration, and advocacy for social change. Presenters, aiming to bridge the academy and the world beyond, discuss their contributions to this scholarly activism through archival processes such as acquisition, preservation, cataloging, description, and outreach. As the role of information professionals has become more focused on providing access to sources, cooperation among archivists, librarians, and researchers offers exciting opportunities to improve the work that all of us do to recover and situate the silent intimacies, elided lives, and lost stories of the past.
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See more of: Lightning Session
See more of: Lightning Session