December 2024
Conference
Tending the Gap: Storytelling as Archival Method
Time: 9:15am–6:30pm EST
Sponsor: Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Location: Cogut Institute, Andrews House
Room: 110
What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to tend to the gaps? Building on the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise,” this symposium showcases research that considers the methods, contradictions, and possibilities of archival studies.
The symposium brings together an interdisciplinary set of projects on a range of topics, including: reading with and alongside ephemera, coloniality and institutional power, artistic responses to archival materials, embracing methodological failures, and the beauty of storytelling and personal archives, among others. Each speaker will complicate the assumptions of the “gaps” and “losses” in the archive in search for other modes of thinking with and alongside a range of archival artifacts.
Schedule
9:15 am–10:45 am
Welcome / Session 1 — Archival Failure: Ethics and Methods
11:15 am–12:30 pm
Session 2 — “Fragments and Ephemera: Loss and Abundance in the Archive”
1:30 pm–2:45 pm
Session 3 — Mediated Archives: Language and Authenticity
3:15 pm–4:30 pm
Session 4 — Archive as Home: The Politics of the Personal
5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Keynote Lecture — Ahmad Greene-Hayes, “Quadrants and Marginalia: Mapping Black Religion in the Archive”
.
Tending the Gap: Storytelling as Archival Method
Time: 9:15am–6:30pm EST
Sponsor: Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Location: Cogut Institute, Andrews House
Room: 110
What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to tend to the gaps? Building on the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise,” this symposium showcases research that considers the methods, contradictions, and possibilities of archival studies.
The symposium brings together an interdisciplinary set of projects on a range of topics, including: reading with and alongside ephemera, coloniality and institutional power, artistic responses to archival materials, embracing methodological failures, and the beauty of storytelling and personal archives, among others. Each speaker will complicate the assumptions of the “gaps” and “losses” in the archive in search for other modes of thinking with and alongside a range of archival artifacts.
Schedule
9:15 am–10:45 am
Welcome / Session 1 — Archival Failure: Ethics and Methods
- K Yin, “Stone I: Asian/Rock Form(ation)s”
- Amber Hawk Swanson, “Doll Closet”
- Lucas Joshi, “In This Garden Called Archive”
- Alexander Chun, “Abject Pleasure: Asian/American Fantasies in the Digital Archive”
11:15 am–12:30 pm
Session 2 — “Fragments and Ephemera: Loss and Abundance in the Archive”
- Shuang Wang, “Voice Beyond ‘Yellow’: Rediscovering the Lives of Early 20th-Century Chinese Singsong Girls”
- Claudia Ojeda Rexach, “Imperial Gaze: The Archive of Puerto Rican Surveillance Photography”
- Jordan Good, “The Life Cycle of a Player-Piano Roll: Material Ephemerality and the Risk of Playing in the Gaps”
- Justina Blanco, “Deathly Intimacy: Unrequited Love and Archival Reanimations”
1:30 pm–2:45 pm
Session 3 — Mediated Archives: Language and Authenticity
- Gery Vargas, “Tierras Celosas”
- Nélari Figueroa Torres, “Land(e)scapes & Sound(e)scapes in the Black Caribbean”
- Brian Dang, “Notes on Twilight Zone: The Movie and What Happens to (Asian) Kids in America”
- Joyce Matos, “chuymar katuqaña”
3:15 pm–4:30 pm
Session 4 — Archive as Home: The Politics of the Personal
- Macie Clerkley, “Gaps in the Archive: Understanding Homeplace in Archaeological Contexts”
- Erin Hardnett, “Mapping Kinship”
- Brooke Johnson, “Touching the Archive: Measuring Distance with Desire”
5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Keynote Lecture — Ahmad Greene-Hayes, “Quadrants and Marginalia: Mapping Black Religion in the Archive”
.