TY - CHAP
T1 - How to Curate a ‘Living Archive’
T2 - The Restlessness of Activist Time and Labour
AU - Chidgey, Red
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R004889/1) Afterlives of Protest Research Network.
Funding Information:
To understand how ‘living archives’ are articulated and distributed across activist, archivist and academic terrains, I deployed multimodal methods in this study. This included following references to ‘living archives’ through digitally archived news sites, hashtags, intertextual references and social media sites. I established how ‘living archive’ assemblages were constructed and invested in by different memory stakeholders through inductive, close readings of activist and mainstream media publications circulated online and through legacy media. This text-based approach was supplemented with background interviews, observations and expert discussion events curated with activists, curators and archivists as part of the Afterlives of Protest research network, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and contextualised through my wider research project on rapid response collecting for the Women’s March, which seeks to understand the challenges the archive sector face when collecting contemporary protest. In what follows, archival assemblages associated with the Arab Spring, Occupy and the Women’s March are mapped, analysed and positioned in dialogue with one another to understand their archival labour and temporalities. As I demonstrate, these illustrative ‘living archives’ enact various practices, sites and motivations, which speak to the wider aims and politics of the movements from which they are drawn.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - This chapter contributes to the much-needed task of theorising the intersections between activist memory, social media platforms, autonomous archives and public history institutions. Tracking invocations of the ‘living archive’ across archival forces connected to the Egyptian Arab Uprising, Occupy and the anti-Trump Women’s March On movement, this chapter provides an emergent theory and methodology of archival assemblages. Drawing attention to issues of activist time and labour within these assemblages, this chapter argues that ‘living archives’ operate as nodal and cluster points within wider digital media and memory ecologies. As sites of uneven political discourse and practice, living archives enable protest memories to become newly available both as creative materials for civic engagement and as unintended materials for state appropriation and repression.
AB - This chapter contributes to the much-needed task of theorising the intersections between activist memory, social media platforms, autonomous archives and public history institutions. Tracking invocations of the ‘living archive’ across archival forces connected to the Egyptian Arab Uprising, Occupy and the anti-Trump Women’s March On movement, this chapter provides an emergent theory and methodology of archival assemblages. Drawing attention to issues of activist time and labour within these assemblages, this chapter argues that ‘living archives’ operate as nodal and cluster points within wider digital media and memory ecologies. As sites of uneven political discourse and practice, living archives enable protest memories to become newly available both as creative materials for civic engagement and as unintended materials for state appropriation and repression.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85144064036&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_9
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_9
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85144064036
T3 - Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
SP - 225
EP - 248
BT - Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
PB - Palgrave Macmillan
ER -
