The Archive and Everyday Life Conference
May 7-8, 2010
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Confirmed Keynotes: Ann Cvetkovich (_An Archive
of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian
Public Cultures_), Angela Grauerholz (_At Work
and Play: A Web Experimentation_), Ben Highmore
(_The Everyday Life Reader_; _Everyday Life and
Cultural Theory_), Michael O'Driscoll (_The Event of the Archive_)
This conference will bring together academics,
advocates, artists, and other cultural workers
to examine the intersecting fields of archive
and everyday life theory. From Simmel through
Mass Observation to contemporary Cultural
Studies theorists, the objective of everyday
life theory has been, as Ben Highmore writes, to
"rescue the everyday from conventional habits of
the mind... to attempt to register the everyday
in all its complexities and contradictions."
Archive theory provides a means to explore these
structures by "making the unfamiliar familiar,"
hence opening the possibility of generating "new
forms of critical practice." The question of a
politics of the archive is critical to the
burgeoning field of archive theory. How do we
begin to theorize the archive as a political
apparatus? Can its effective democratization be
measured by the participation of those who
engage with both its constitution and its interpretation?
"Archive" is understood to cover a range of
objects, from a museum's collection to a
personal photograph album, from a repository of
a writer's papers in a library to an artist's
installation of found objects. Regardless of its
content, the archive works to contain, organize,
represent, render intelligible, and produce
narratives. The archive has often worked to
legitimate the rule of those in power and to
produce a historical narrative that presents
class structure and power relations as both
common-sense and inevitable. This function of
the archive as a machine that produces
History--telling us what is significant, valued,
and worth preserving, and what isn't&--is
enabled through an understanding of the archive
as neutral and objective (and too banal and
boring to be political!). The archive has long
occupied a privileged space in affirmative
culture, and as a result, the archive has been
revered from afar and aestheticized, but not
understood as a potential object of critical practice.
Can a dialogue between archive theory and
everyday life theory work to "take revenge" on
the archive (Cvetkovich)? If the archive works
to produce historical narratives, can we seize
the archive and its attendant collective
consciousness as a tool for resistance in
countering dominant History with resistant
narratives? While the archive has worked to
preserve a transcendental, "affirmative" form of
culture, bringing everyday life theory into
conversation with archive theory opens up the
possibility of directing critical attention to
both the wonders and drudgeries of the everyday.
Archiving the everyday--revealing class
structures and oppression on the basis of race
and gender, rendering working and living
conditions under global capitalism visible,
audible, and intelligible--redirects us from our
busyness and distractedness, and focuses our
attention on that which has not been understood
to be deserving of archiving. The archive
provides the time and space to think through !
a collection of objects organized around
particular set of interests. If the archive
could grant us a space in which to examine
everyday life, rather than sweeping it under
the carpet as a trivial banality, we could
begin to understand our conditions and develop the desire to change them.
How can we envision the archive as a site of
ethics and/or politics? Does the archive simply
represent a place to amass memory, or can it,
following Benjamin, represent a site to make
visible a history of the present, thus amassing
fragments of the everyday, which can in turn be
used to uproot the authority of the past to
question the present? In short, what happens
when we move beyond the archive as merely a
collection and begin to theorize it as a site of
constant renewal and struggle within which the
past and present can come together? Furthermore,
how then does the archive as an everyday
practice allow us to understand or change our
perception of temporality, memory, and this historical moment?
Areas of inquiry for submissions may include,
but are not limited to, the following topics and questions:
· The archive both includes and excludes;
it works to preserve while simultaneously doing
violence. Are the acts of selection, collection,
ordering, systematizing, and cataloguing inherently violent?
· The question of digitization: the
internet as digital archive and the digitization
of the physical archive. Digitizing the archive
renders collections invisible and distant, yet
increasingly searchable and quantifiable. Does
the digitization of the archive reveal new ways
of seeing persistent power structures? Or does it hide them?
· National and colonial archiving:
questions of power and national identity.
· The utopian, radical potential of the
archive as well as its dystopian possibilities.
· Indigenous modes of archiving.
· Visibility and pedagogy: while the
archive often works to hide, conceal, and store
away, it can also reveal and display that which
otherwise remains invisible. Do barriers to
access restrict this emancipatory function of the archive?
· Questions of collective memory and
nostalgia (for Benjamin, a retreat to a place of
comfort through nostalgia is not a political act).
· The archive as revisionist history.
· The archive as a form of surveillance.
· The role of reflexivity with respect to
the manner in which the archive is constructed/produced/curated.
· Function of the narrative form for the
archive: how does the way in which the archive
reveals its own constructedness unravel the
concept of the archive as "historical truth"?
· The future of the archive: preservation
and collection look forwards as well as into the
past. How should we understand the hermeneutic
function of the archive and the struggle over its interpretation?
· The relationship between the archive and the archivist/archon.
· Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in
the archive: who speaks and who is spoken for?
· The affective relationship between the archive and the body.
Following the conference, we intend to publish
an edited collection of essays based on the
papers presented at the conference to facilitate
the circulation of ideas in this exciting field of inquiry.
"The Archive and Everyday Life" Conference will
take place 7-8 May, 2010, sponsored by the
Department of English and Cultural Studies at
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John
Douglas Taylor Fund). The conference format will
be diverse, including paper presentations,
panels, round-table exchanges, artistic
performances, and exhibitions. We encourage
individual and collaborative paper and panel
proposals from across the disciplines and from artists and community members.
Paper Submissions should include (1) contact
information; (2) a 300-500 word abstract; and
(3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief bio.
Panel Proposals should include (1) a cover sheet
with contact information for chair and each
panelist; (2) a one-page rationale explaining
the relevance of the panel to the theme of the
conference; (3) a 300 word abstract for each
proposed paper; and (4) a one page curriculum vitae for each presenter.
Please submit individual paper proposals or full
panel proposals via e-mail attachment by October
15, 2009 to (tayconf /at/ mcmaster.ca) with the subject
line "Archive." Attachments should be in .doc or
.rtf formats. Submissions should be one document
(i.e. include all required information in one attached document).
Conference organizing committee:
Mary O'Connor, Jennifer Pybus, and Sarah Blacker
Website: http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~english/Taylor_2010/index.html
Sarah Blacker
PhD Student
Department of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
