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Call for paper proposals for the AAA panel:
/The life of documents: New beginnings, new ends./
Documents are rarely finished, even, or especially, when they are placed
into archives. They may be amended, added to or censored. They come to
be reproduced, refiled, misfiled, or transformed into new technological
formats. They can also be distributed, withdrawn or elevated to iconic
status. Imbued with new, unintended meanings, they can become
testimonies, symbols of memory or legal evidence. In a range of
contexts, this panel will trace the life of archival documents as they
transform through time and space. Speakers are invited to consider the
political, technological and social genealogies of such documents as
they are manipulated, and come to be agents in their own right, within
chains of relations.
Documents are powerful 'artifacts of modern knowledge' (Riles 2006:5),
ubiquitous in today's world. We ask: how is access to archives that
stockpile or conceal personal and collective 'data' being negotiated in
the public sphere, and how are ideas of 'the commons' and 'privacy'
being reconceptualised in the process? Furthermore, how do archival
documents engage in political struggles, not just as tools of
legitimacy, but as powerful affective focal points of outrage, nostalgia
or apathy? We also invite speakers to reflect on the place of new
digital archives within the practices of ethnographic research, and
suggest ways in which access to sensitive documents can be negotiated.
Speakers could consider how academic analyses of archival documents acts
to reify, transform or place into public circulation such objects,
perhaps with unintended, ethically complex consequences.
Co-organizers:
Chris Kaplonski (University of Cambridge)
Catherine Trundle (Victoria University of Wellington / Cambridge)
Discussant: Ilana Feldman (George Washington University)
Submissions for consideration should be sent to Chris Kaplonski
([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>_) by 15 March.
--
Christopher Kaplonski
Senior Research Associate
Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit
The Mond Building
Free School Lane Cambridge, CB2 3RF
and
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Tel: +44 01223 769337
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