[Commlist] CFP: Archiving Activism in the Digital Age

Call for contributions
*Archiving activism in the digital age*
edited by Ann Rigney (Utrecht University) and Daniele Salerno (Utrecht 
University)

Contemporary repertoires of protest have been adapting to 
digitally-oriented media environments (Tilly 2006; Hoskins 2017; Treré 
2018; Merrill, Keightley, and Daphi 2020), begging the question how they 
will be archived for the future. Since the global wave of protests 
against the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the debate on archiving 
activism in the digital age has gained momentum, bringing activists, 
archivists, policy makers and scholars into new dialogue.  How to 
preserve the cultural production of born-digital movements, why and what 
should be preserved, who should do the work, for and on behalf of whom, 
who can claim the ownership of social movements’ 
legacies-in-the-making?  These are just a few of the questions that have 
been surfacing in recent debates on the entanglements of archiving and 
activism ( Flinn and Alexander 2015, Della Ratta, Dickinson, and 
Haugbolle 2020; Caswell 2021). Concern about the real risk of losing the 
traces of recent movements and their cultural production gives to these 
issues an added urgency.

  For several decades now, moreover, there have been growing demands 
for the digitization of older collections pertaining to social movements 
from earlier times. This was given a new urgency by the COVID-19 
pandemic and the very limited accessibility of physical archives in 2020 
and 2021. But it is part of a longer-term trend which reflects the 
growing centrality of the digital in social and political life, and the 
growing demand for digitally accessible archival resources that can be 
used for multiple purposes: academic research, activism, artistic and 
curatorial projects. The digitization of existing collections calls 
again for a critical reflection on the risks and opportunities entailed 
in the digital remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999; Erll and Rigney 
2009) of the legacy of past social movements.

  At stake in these debates is the digital in its different, although 
entangled, functions: i) the digital as media used by activists and 
social movements for and in protests; ii) the digital as technology for 
archiving the cultural production of present and past movements; iii) 
the digital as an active agent in archiving processes (Latour 2005), 
which fixes, through its affordances and algorithms, the conditions for 
the collection and future retrieval of the cultural memory of protests.

The proposed edited volume aims to contribute to these debates from a 
broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives. It seeks to advance 
recent work in memory studies, media studies, (critical) archival 
studies and social movement studies, by bringing into dialogue scholars, 
archivists and activists (though these roles may overlap). By focusing 
on the archiving-activism nexus, our aim is also to productively bridge 
the different conceptualizations of “archive” and in particular the 
contraposition between the epistemological idea of “the Archive” in the 
Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1969) and of archives as material – even 
when “just digital” – socio-cultural spaces (Sheffield 2020).

Contributions may include, but are not limited to, these topics:
- Archiving activism and activist archiving in the digital age: 
professional and activist epistemologies;
- archiving digital repertoires of protest;
- the legacy of past social movements: digitization, digital 
remediations and reuses for mobilization in the present;
-  how the digital drives memory- and oblivion-making in archiving 
processes: algorithms and digital affordances;
- methodologies in digital humanities: opportunities and challenges 
offered by the digital for the study of the cultural memories of protest 
(distant reading, etc…)
- conditions of circulation and availability of archival material in the 
digital age;
- digital archives as social spaces for activism;
- new forms of digital or web-based grassroots or self-curated movement 
archives;
- the effect of copyright and privacy legislations in archiving activism 
and memory work;
- use of archives for digital curations and story-telling

* Abstract submission deadline*: May 15, 2022
Please submit a title and an abstract of around 500 words with a short 
bio (80 words) to: (a.rigney /at/ uu.nl) <mailto:(a.rigney /at/ uu.nl)> and 
(d.salerno /at/ uu.nl) <mailto:(d.salerno /at/ uu.nl)>.
Abstracts should reference up to 10 works in the relevant literature and 
six keywords.
*Notification of abstract acceptance*: June 1, 2022
*Full paper submission*: October 14, 2022 (between 4500 and 7500 words, 
including footnotes and bibliography)

The volume will be published open access.

Editors
*Ann Rigney *is professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht 
University, and PI of the ERC-funded project “Remembering Activism”; 
www.rememberingactivism.eu <http://www.rememberingactivism.eu>.
*Daniele Salerno* is Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellow at Utrecht 
University, and PI of the project “Cultural Memory in LGBT Activism”; 
www.memorights.eu <http://www.memorights.eu>.

*References*
Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding 
New Media. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.
Caswell, Michelle. 2021. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory 
Work. London-New York: Routledge.
Della Ratta, Donatella, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle, eds. 2020. 
The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows. Amsterdam: 
Institute of Network Cultures.
Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney, eds. 2009. Mediation, Remediation, and the 
Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin:  de Gruyter.
Flinn, Andrew, and Ben Alexander. 2015. “‘Humanizing an Inevitability 
Political Craft’: Introduction to the Special Issue on Archiving 
Activism and Activist Archiving.” Archival Science 15(4): 329–335.
Foucault, Michel. 1969. Archaeology of Knowledge. London-New York: 
Routledge.
Hoskins, Andrew, ed. 2017. Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in 
Transition. London-New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to 
Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Merrill, Samuel, Emily Keightley, and Priska Daphi, eds. 2020. Social 
Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media: Mobilising Mediated 
Remembrance. Cham: Palgrave.
Rigney, Ann. 2018. “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism beyond the 
Traumatic.” Memory Studies 11(3):368–80.
Sheffield, Rebecka Taves. 2020. Documenting rebellions: a study of four 
lesbian and gay archives in queer times. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books.
Tilly, Charles. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press.
Treré, Emiliano. 2018. Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, 
Algorithms. London-New York: Routledge.
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