Short Abstract

How do archives, as knowledge institutions or places, move and how are they are moved—materially, affectively, and politically? This panel asks how affective charges are sedimented and activated in the making, unmaking and remaking of archives across analogue, digital and other-than-human forms.

Long Abstract

Archives are no longer only seen as static repositories where things come to rest but as being constantly in motion: they are moved and they move. This shift also broadens what can count as an archive, including not only institutions and places that hold collections of items, but also other-than-human forms of knowledge-inscription, such as ecological landscapes, built environments as well as physical substances or matter. Building on this, the panel asks how affect, materiality and politics converge in the making, unmaking and remaking of a broad range of archives.

Colonial and imperial projects of collecting displaced objects and knowledge from their contexts of origin, re-embedding them in regimes of extraction, ordering and displaying. These processes also generated hierarchies of knowledge, of what counts as archival or authoritative, and are deeply political. In the current age, notions of authority, ownership and access are re-negotiated and contested across institutional, legal and diplomatic arenas, from museum boards to restitution debates. Yet, archived things or other-than-human archives are not passive residues of these histories and legacies: they carry agency and biography, are inscribed with knowledge, and can be reactivated through reengagement, reinterpretation and returns, thus unsettling the archive's predominant colonial framing.

This panel invites contributors to think about the affective charge of archives (analogue, digital and other-than-human): how are feelings of care, obligation, hope, justice or belonging sedimented in ‘things’ (paper, images, sound, stones, mountains and others), and how do they re-surface, transform or vanish when they are digitized, contested, rebuilt or destroyed?