The Archive as a Site of (Un)exception: exploring the historical geographer’s commitments to the community

Keywords: Archives, Historical Geography, Methods
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17

Abstract

The once-radical practice of community engagement and collaboration has become a standard or norm for socially just research practices within the field of geography. Physical geographers, cartographers, GIS scientists, and human geographers all, to varying degrees, grapple with how their role as a researcher intersects with the community that they will ultimately represent; however, community commitments are primarily absent from past and contemporary research methods in historical geography. Whether outlined in Progress in Human Geography or Sage’s most recent Methods in Geography, historical geographic methods ultimately treat the archive as a site of geographical exception. This designation releases historical geographers, including myself, from our geographical obligation to the communities that collectively maintain archives. For this session, I engage with the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who expanded upon Michel Foucault’s biopolitics by excavating Carl Schmitt’s concept— the state of exception— to illuminate how actions seemingly exist beyond the boundaries of the norm can be indefinitely maintained? From this work, I hope to encourage my fellow historical geographers to destabilize the archive’s exceptional status by reflecting upon the following question: What are our obligations as historical geographers to the community, and how might addressing these commitments concretize the relevance of our research to the community we represent?