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Appel
Date limite de soumission : dimanche 20 juillet 2025
Appel à communications pour un colloque junior organisé par les doctorant.e.s de Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po Paris et de Northwestern University
Organizing committee : Ebunoluwa Iyamu (CHSP), Isabelle Linais (CHSP), Semiu Adegbenle (Northwestern University), Alexandra Koroleva (CHSP)
Sont attendues des contributions de 350 mots et un court CV académique jusqu’au 20 juillet 2025 à peripheralarchivesworkshop chez gmail.com
As noticed with Jacques Derrida’s “archival fever” and Ann Laura Stoler’s “archival turn”, archives and archival research have continuously been an integral part of historical research in one way or another. However, archives’ histories, meanings, inner logics, culture, and practices have not always been on the surface of attention among modern historians.
Professionalized archivists shaped modern historiographical inquiries, and specialists in ancient and medieval societies have apprehended archives as acts of conserving and erasing written documents with the aim of building a collective, a state, a family or religious memory, or for the practical use of taxation and trade (Orrieux, 1986 ; Goody, 1986 ; Clanchy, 1993).
French philosopher Jacques Derrida goes deeper into disassembling archival infrastructure to decipher the origins and meaning of the “archive” revealing the direct connection between the physicality of archives and the question of power that endows someone with responsibility, privilege, and competence to represent lawful authority and thus accept, store and guard official documents (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1995).
We do not limit the approach to archives as “place”-set – we propose to view archives not just as locations or buildings with corpuses of documents being guarded inside, but as symbolic spaces that for some reason came to be, based on someone’s design of harmonisation of the elements that are consigned. Thus, the location or the building itself can be endowed with symbolic meaning and power – something that we also propose to look at, together with the changing nature of such structures (degradation, ruination, renovation, modernisation, relocation, etc.), structural imperfections and discrepancies.
Little room is left for investigating alternative archives : those located in remote regions and countries, as well as non-institutional archives, museums, private archival collections or grassroots-initiated archives of a family, of working class private life, of a village or a town district. Gathering vernacular archives and literature with unusual narrative regimes and quality of conservation, for instance among subaltern groups, as well as understanding the local social meanings (from indifference to sacred value) of this material can be challenging. For this reason, this workshop aims at bringing together reflexive thoughts on practical experiences in peripheral archives in a broader sense.
We propose to understand “peripheral” archives as those located a) outside of the Western European knowledge-production domain on the level of state institutions, b) on the margins of accessibility and visibility both by their subject and their creators’ positionality.
Thus, on the one hand, we would want to draw researchers’ attention to and expertise on the archives of the Global South writ large (i.e., from Southern and Eastern Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa and to Central and South-East Asia). On the other hand, we intend to bring forward the complexities and paradoxes of those archives that are “on the periphery” of a “periphery” (i.e., those related to marginalised or understudied social groups, processes, or objects). In other words, we are interested in exploring archives through the lens of what Dipesh Chakrabarty called “subaltern pasts” (Chakrabarty, 2007). We presume that the focus on “peripheral” archives can bring forward a few problematics that reflect research focusing on Eurasian and African contexts :
a. peripheral archives and (un)accessibility : (in)formal restrictions, state imperial logics of (de)classification of archival materials, changing values of documents across political regimes and conflicts, construction of “archival periphery” and relations with state institutions
b. peripheral archives and colonialities : control of and decolonization of knowledge production, “imperial debris” and archives, marginalization of knowledge, (post)colonial spatiality
c. vernacular archives and grassroots archival projects
We invite submissions on any aspect mentioned above (but not limited to the list) in relation to the modern history of Eurasia and Africa, regardless of the time period. We particularly welcome proposals from PhD students (post-graduate researchers) and early-career researchers.
The one-day workshop is organised by a collective of PhD candidates from Centre for History of Sciences Po (CHSP) and Northwestern University and is supported by the Africa Programme of Sciences Po Paris.
We expect participants to give 15-min presentations that will be discussed by panel chairs and peers. The working language of the workshop will be English.
Financial aid for traveling to France will be partially available upon request. Please send 350-word proposals and short academic CV to the organisers :
peripheralarchivesworkshop chez gmail.com by July 20, 2025.
Colloque
Vendredi 10 octobre 2025 (SciencesPo Paris)
Page créée le lundi 6 octobre 2025, par Webmestre.
