Scholar-Activism in the Archive: Accountability, Responsibility, Justice and Healing

Keywords: archival methods, historical geography, cancel culture, folklore, museum studies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 2

Abstract

Thanks to the activism and momentum of the #MeToo movement, alongside other powerful social movements such as Black Lives Matter, there is an increasing awareness of the need for accountability across nearly every facet of society. Critical attention to the raced, gendered, sexed, and classed realities of the present have shed light on the violences of everyday life, from pop music to medical practices. This is certainly true in the world of knowledge production. However, adjacent to the rise in accountability has been a rise in what many consider ‘cancel culture,’ which has garnered a myriad of critiques. In short, people ask: has cancel culture gone too far or not far enough? This paper engages with this compex question through the lens of archival research. More specifically, given that archival production is a process deeply imbued with fraught power relations and is based on (often violent) exclusions about what does and does not count as knowledge, we ask: what is appropriate when engaging with archival knowledge produced through violence? Or, what to do with ‘good knowledge’ made by ‘bad people’? To answer these questions, I reflect on my research with an organization (intentionally unnamed for anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic) that has been collecting folk knowledge since the 1960s. In addition to theorizing what scholar-activism looks like in the archives and our reflections of doing this work, I conclude by thinking more broadly about researchers’ responsibilities to the voices of the archive.