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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  They can also be distributed, withdrawn or elevated to iconic 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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