Introductory description

What can archives and archival ways of thinking offer sociologists? Archival theory and practices are most closely associated with historical research, offering social researchers access to documents, data, stories and ephemera about past people, places and events. An increasingly expansive notion of archive has been taken up in less traditional ways, as an archaeological device for constructing and structuring knowledge, whether past, present or future. This module enables students to encounter archival materials and ideas and to think critically about those encounters. These encounters will involve reading, listening, smelling and feeling documents, stories, images, ephemera. They will involve attending to archival absences and exclusions in order to evaluate what archives tell us about the relationship between knowledge and power.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Encountering archive/s as sociologists
2. Modern Records Centre (MRC)
3. Politics and power #1: race and empire in the archives
4. Politics and power #3: community archives
5. Politics and power #2: documents of state
6. Reading week -research in the MRC
7. Queer archives
8. Imaginaries and affects: absences and animations
9. Assessment workshop

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Use basic practical archival skills such as searching databases and working directly with digital and hard copies of archival material
• Evaluate a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches in relation to archives
• Recognise the value of archival materials as data
• Reflect critically on the ways in which their archival encounters generate new materials

Indicative reading list

Abotsi, E (2020) Sociology in the Archives 2019-2020 Project. Race and Ethnicity. British Sociological Association with the British Library https://www.britsoc.co.uk/media/25531/sociology_in_the_archives_report_2019-20.pdf

Ahmed, S (2012) A willfullness Archive Theory and Event, 15(3)

Arondekar, A, Cvetkovich, A, Hanhardt, C, Kunzel, R, Nyong’o, T, Rodríguez, J and Stryker, S (2015) Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion Radical History Review 122: 211-231.

Bastian A, and Alexander B (2009) (eds) Community archives: the shaping of memory. Facet, London

Burnard, T and Lean, J (2002) Hearing Slave Voices; the Fiscal’s reports of Berbice ajd Demerara-Essequibo, Archives, 27(106): 37-50.

Burns K (2010) Into the archive: writing and power in colonial Peru. Duke University Press, Durham NC

Carby, H (2020) The National Archives, InVisible Culture, 31 available at https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/the-national-archives/

Carland, T R and Cvetkovich A (2013) Sharing an Archive of Feelings; a conversation, Art Journal 72(2): 215-224.

Chaterjee, I (1997) Testing the local against the colonial archive History Workshop Journal, 44: 215-224.

Condit-Shrestha. K (2021) Archives, Adoption Records, and Owning Historical Memory, in Levison, D, Maynes, MJ, Vavrus, F (eds) Children and Youth as Subjects, Agents, Objects: innovative approaches to research across and space time, Minneapolis: Palgrave Macmillan pp 155-174.

Ghosh, D (2004) Decoding the Nameless: Gender, Subjectivity and Historical Methodologies in Reading the Archives of Colonial India, in K Wilson (ed) A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, Modernity, 1600-1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 297-316.

Hall, Stuart (2001) Constituting an archive, Third Text, 15:54, 89-92
(for information about the archive to which this article refers see https://vads.ac.uk/digital/collection/AAVAA)

Hartman, S (2019) Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, London: Serpent’s Tail. Read A Note on Method (pp xii -xv) at a minimum (recommend whole book).

Hochberg, G (2021) Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke University Press, 2021)

Jansen, E (2011) From Thandi the Maid to Thandi the Madam: Domestic Workers in the Archives of Afrikaans Literature and a Family Photograph Album, South African Review of Sociology, 42:2(102-121).

Kin-Long, T (2022) Archiving social movement memories amidst autocratization: a case study of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 28:6, 733-751

la Bird, B & Carrigan, M (2015) Bird la Bird on queer history, invisibility and playing in the archive. The Sociological Review Magazine. https://thesociologicalreview.org/podcasts/podcast-sociology/bird-la-bird-on-queer-history-invisibility-and-playing-in-the-archive/ (Podcast)

Lauzon, C (2015) A home for loss: Doris Salcedo’s melancholic archives, Memory Studies 82(2):197-211.

Local Studies Group (2021) What is a Community Archive?
https://lslibrarians.wordpress.com/2021/04/08/toolkit-community-archives/

Lian, Z (2021) Dancing with the State: The Emergence and Survival of Community Archives in Mainland China, Archives and Manuscripts 49(3): 228–243

Lowry, J (2017) (ed) Displaced Archives, London: Imprint.

Manoff, M(2004) ‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’ Portal: Library and the Academy 4 (1): 9-25 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v004/4.1manoff.html

Migraine-George, T and Currier, A (2016) Querying Queer African Archives: Methods and Movements Women’s Studies Quarterly 44(3/4): 190–207

Osborne, T (1999) The Ordinariness of the Archive, History of the Human Sciences 12(2): 51-64.

Steedman, C (2001) Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust Author(s). The American Historical Review 106(4):1159-1180.

Schmidt L “Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research,” Society of American Archivists, https://www2.archivists.org/usingarchives

Scott, EJ (nd) Public History and the Queer Archive
https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/podcast/queer-lives-public-history-and-the-queer-archive/ (podcast)

Sissay, L (2019) My Name is Why: a memoir, Canongate.

Stoler AL (2009) Along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tamboukou, M (2019) New Materialisms in the archive: in the mode of an oevre à faire,
MAI Feminism available at https://maifeminism.com/new-materialisms-in-the-archive-in-the-mode-of-an-oeuvre-a-faire/ accessed March 2023.

Viebach, J, Hovestädt, D and Lühe, U (2021) Beyond Evidence: The Use of Archives in Transitional Justice, The International Journal of Human Rights 25(3): 381–402.

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Research element

Part of the assessment involves students undertaking their own archival research in the Modern Records Centre.

Interdisciplinary

Archives are inherently interdisciplinary and the module focuses on developing sociological encounters with archives in relation to a wide interdisciplinary literature.

International

Literature used throughout the module draws on international research and many of the archival materials students encounter require them to consider a range of national and international contexts.

Subject specific skills

Close and critical reading and ability to evaluate sociological arguments and evidence
Archival research skills applicable to their own sociological research
Synthesis of a wide range of interdisciplinary texts and scholarly materials through a sociological lens
Continue to advance their knowledge and understanding of theories and methods in sociology

Transferable skills

Deal with complex issues systematically and creatively
Make sound judgements in the absence of complete data
Communicate ideas and conclusions clearly
Demonstrate self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems
Plan and implement scholarly research tasks
Time management
Digital and in-person data search and find skills.