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Julia Molinari
Dec 28, 2024, 1:50:16 PM12/28/24
to aila-p...@googlegroups.com
Hello,
I'm very grateful for this CfP, which I am considering ....
In the meantime, would you mind if I shared it via my social media:
In solidarity,
Julia
On Sat, 28 Dec 2024 at 18:06, <aila-p...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Patty Wilde <patrici...@gmail.com>: Dec 27 10:32AM -0800
Dear Colleagues:
Please consider submitting a proposal to our *Rhetoric Review Symposium on
Emergency Archives: Investigating Rhetorical (Im)Possibility, Action, and
the Impact of Precarious “Preservation” Under Crisis*
Google Doc Link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dN2LuTRT2DimdElORyyGOhMMLey3ViuPaAP9WRqVlaY/edit?usp=sharing
Editors: Kathryn Manis, Bibhushana Poudyal, Sumaiya Sarker Sharmin, and
Patty Wilde
The ongoing—and now significantly escalated—genocide of Palestinian peoples
by the Israeli government has been uniquely, painfully, and steadfastly
documented and shared for far-flung viewers to instantaneously bear witness
to atrocities that might otherwise remain unfathomable to the international
community. Palestinian peoples have been recording their own intensified
annihilation in a brave, painstaking, persistent, and
not-always-intentional manner. These acts of documentation have not only
subverted social media censorship, corporate media blackouts and
misrepresentations, and white-washed sanitizations of the violence for the
rest of the world, but have also highlighted the imperative need for a
shift in how we approach, act upon, experience, and learn from archives
born out of emergency. While the context and material conditions of this
shift are horrific and incomprehensible, such a reorientation is necessary
in a world repeatedly and increasingly under crisis.
This *Rhetoric Review *symposium on emergency archives takes inspiration
from the Palestinian peoples as well as other individual and grassroots
forms of preservation that have been used to combat oppressive forces,
build intersectional social movements, and work toward a more just and
equitable future. Noteworthy examples include George Holliday's recording
of four police officers beating Rodney King; public documentation of the
Arab Spring in Egypt; the #BLM movement; Darnella Frazier’s filming of
George Floyd’s murder by police; documentation of the life-death
experiences of people during COVID-19; numerous public recordings of
student-led protest in Bangladesh that ousted Sheikh Hasina; and the Alt
National Park Service’s proactive efforts to record government websites on
climate change before Trump takes office. From phone-captured videos of
state-sanctioned violence to collaboratively managed physical archives in
extra-institutional spaces, these instances render visible how community
members make use of whatever tools, time, and skills are available to
create emergency archives.
As we theorize them, emergency archives take three distinct but overlapping
forms: 1) archives constructed during emergency; 2) archives used in times
of emergency; 3) archives that call us to act without delay. Inherently
action-oriented, emergency archives are born of circumstances that demand
our immediate attention and response. Reflecting the French etymology of
the word “emergency,” these repositories challenge extant conditions by
“bring[ing] forth, bring[ing] to light” the inequities that persist in the
world around us, compelling us toward justice-driven solidarity work.
Illustrative of what KJ Rawson calls the “rhetorical power of archives,”
these collections persuade us to a particular interpretation of the events
they document (20). Antithetical and alternative to the narratives of
institutional archives in this discourse, emergency archives emerge
directly from moments, experiences, and locations of crisis. In this way,
they necessarily subvert the inequities in archival history that Howard
Zinn famously highlights in his acknowledgement that, “the most powerful,
the richest elements in society have the greatest capacity to find
documents, preserve them, and decide what is or is not available to the
public'' (20).
As scholars working at various intersections of English Studies, Rhetoric
and Composition, and Library Science, we recognize a heightened need for
cultural knowledge and heritage preservation as we collectively face the
consequences and future of genocide, war, climate crisis, and ideological
debates impacting the safety and autonomy of millions. And we recognize an
equally dire need for new and extra-institutional modes of storytelling.
We’ve witnessed archives of necessity emerging across the globe as forms of
resistance against both violent narratives and violent actions, many of
which are generated, preserved, and made accessible in real-time, serving
as in-the-moment documentation of war, environmental devastation, attempted
genocide, and dramatic losses of civil and bodily rights. And they often
exist on web platforms, which are both highly accessible and inherently
vulnerable.
For this symposium, we invite contributions engaged in creating and
managing, teaching with/about, responding to, interacting with, or thinking
deeply about emergency archives and the conditions from which they emerge.
We encourage collaborative and/or interdisciplinary projects that explore
distinctions between “traditional” and grassroots archives, push the
boundaries of academic and activist orientations to memory work, and
challenge understandings of what an archive can mean, do, and require in
worlds marked by crisis. Our team — comprising teachers, researchers,
memory workers, community collaborators, and “traditional”
librarians/archivists — recognizes that we do not have final answers to
these pressing questions. Through this symposium, we are eager to invite
and engage in collaborative, contingent, and perhaps open-ended and
contradictory dialogues. We welcome projects and genres that resonate with
the questions and anxieties that accompany our collective inquiry into the
profound role of emergency archives in times of turmoil and injustice.
Potential Questions Include, But Are Not Limited To:
- What novel forms do emergency archives take? In what places do we see
them emerge? And how do they circulate?
- How might political and regime shifts happening globally affect and/or
precipitate the need for extra-institutional archives and archives of
emergency?
- While many mainstream institutional archives are “at once an
instrument of oppressive power,” how can decolonial emergency archives
function as “a potential weapon of liberatory struggle” (Harris 2)?
- How can emergency archives be envisaged as a space for “the
reconstruction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed
subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages” that bring “to the
foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and
understanding and, consequently, other economies, other politics, other
ethics” (Mignolo 453)?
- How can emergency archives disturb and disrupt the collective memories
imposed by discourses manufactured, disseminated, and amplified by
exploitative dominant systems?
- In what ways have emergency archives been threatened, bowdlerized,
censored or otherwise harmed or destroyed?
- What are the implications of climate catastrophe on our current
systems of preservation, emergent and otherwise? What can both
institutional and grassroots archivists learn from emergency archives to
better prepare for increasingly unknown and devastating weather patterns?
- How can grassroots, community-built emergency archives, storytelling,
and memory work help reshape transformative archival theory, philosophy,
and praxis?
- What is the role, if any, of the “traditional” or “institutional”
archivist in the maintenance and amplification of emergency archives? And
if there isn’t, what can that tell us about the state and role of archival
repositories?
Submission Information:
Please send roughly 300-word proposals to *emergency...@gmail.com
<emergency...@gmail.com>* by *Jan. 13, 2025.* Final manuscripts,
including references and footnotes, should not exceed 4,000 words. Final
submissions are editorially reviewed, not peer reviewed.
Proposed Timeline:
Jan. 13: Proposals Due
Feb. 10: Invitations Sent
May 12: Article Drafts Due
June 14: Feedback Returned
Aug. 11: Revised Articles Due
End of Sept. 2025: Full Manuscript Submitted
Jan. 2026: Symposium Published
References
Ahmed, S. (2021). *Complaint!* Duke University Press.
Caswell, M. (2021). *Urgent archives: Enacting liberatory memory work* (1st
ed.). Routledge.
Christen, K., & Anderson, J. (2019). Toward slow archives. *Archival
Science, 19*(2), 87–116. *https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09307-x
<https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09307-x>*
Escobar, A. (2018). *Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence,
autonomy, and the making of worlds*. Duke University Press.
Ghaddar, J. J., & Caswell, M. (2019). “To go beyond”: Towards a decolonial
archival praxis. *Archival Science, 19*(2), 71–85. *https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09311-1
<https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09311-1>*
Harris, V. S. (2021). *Ghosts of archive: Deconstructive intersectionality
and praxis*. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Hartman, S. V. (2019). *Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate
histories of social upheaval* (1st ed.). W.W. Norton & Company.
hooks, b. (2015). *Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking Black* (New
ed.). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Kirsch, G., et al. (2023). *Unsettling archival research: Engaging
critical, communal, and digital archives*. Southern Illinois University
Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking - The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of
coloniality, and the grammar of decoloniality. *Cultural Studies, 21*(2–3),
449–514. *https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647
<https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647>*
Rawson, K. J. (2018). The rhetorical power of archival description:
Classifying images of gender transgression. *Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 48*(4),
327–351. *https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2017.1347951
<https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2017.1347951>*
Stoler, A. L. (2009). *Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and
colonial common sense*. Princeton University Press.
Steiner, L., & Zelizer, B. (1995). Competing memories: Reading the past
against the grain: The shape of memory studies. *Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, 12*(2), 213–239. *https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039509366932
<https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039509366932>*
Zinn, H. (1877). Secrecy, archives, and public interest. *Midwestern
Archivist, 2*(2), 14–26. Minds at University of Wisconsin. *http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/44114
<http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/44114>*
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Patty Wilde
Dec 28, 2024, 2:07:26 PM12/28/24
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Hi Julia,
Yes, please share the CFP! Let me know if you have any questions about submissions.
My best,
Patty Wilde
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