קולו קורא לכנס "מי האחראי לארכיונים? גישה בינתחומית לאתיקה בעידן הדיגיטלי" - דדליין 13.4 (אנגלית)

[David Amitai]

כנס היברידי (פיזי ומקוון) 

Call for Papers 

 

Conference Title: Who is Responsible for the Archives? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Ethics in a Digital Age

 

When: Friday 26 June 2026, 9:00–5:00 pm

 

Where: Aston University campus in Birmingham, UK, and online (hybrid format)

 

Theme: Archives are vital repositories for preserving the past, for documenting the present, and for building memories and legacies for the future. Although they hold relevance to everybody’s history and affect society as a whole, they have long been the purview of a limited group of archivists and historians. In recent years, this has begun to change: archives, both as documents and as repositories, have received increasing attention from scholars across diverse disciplines and also from the broader public.

 

However, if questions of representation, digital transformation, and long-term preservation have become central to contemporary debates, issues related to ethics remain often limited to legal compliance or confined to a limited group of specialists. Building on previous debates including the US 2018 National Forum on Ethics & Archiving the Web and the ICA’s 2022 Ethics and Archives Online Discussion, and also on the ARA’s ongoing work in this area, this conference seeks to expand this discussion by bringing together experts and practitioners from all fields.

 

In particular, it explores three themes:

 

1. Ethics as resilience and environmental sustainability, including the cost and benefits of digital and AI infrastructures.

 

2. Ethics as a moral and philosophical issue, considering questions such as the right to be remembered versus the right to be forgotten, or the use of and modification of archival material in the digital arena, while finding a balance between ensuring that people have a voice/the option of leaving a historical record and protecting sensitive, personal, or restricted data;

 

3. Ethics as a form of social justice, investigating issues of representation (how to ensure diversity, inclusion, and accessibility) and the dynamics of power involved when appraising the value of records, making decisions about their destruction or preservation, or setting standards for classification, description, access regimes, and long-term governance.

 

We invite all academics and practitioners from all fields within and outside of the humanities to present proposals. These might include legal scholars, linguists, philosophers, sociologists, record managers, engineers, security, IT specialists, and experts in infrastructure, education and in the medical sciences, as well as historians, archivists, and professionals active in archives, and all interested in discussing and sharing the responsibility to discuss and address the vital ethical issues connected to them.

 

Selected papers will be included in a proposal for a special issue in a leading interdisciplinary journal. Selected participants will be invited to collaborate in future grant applications and scholarly initiatives. They will also have the opportunity to contribute to crafting a set of best-practice guidelines and a toolkit aimed at sharing responsibility across sectors and at improving accountability, civic education, and engagement on these issues within and outside of existing institutional systems.

 

Convenors: Aston University Archives Centre (AUAC), an interdisciplinary hub linked to the Aston University Archives (AUA) focused on the study of Aston University and its predecessor institutions, the history of research conducted there, and the problem of archiving in the twenty-first century.

 

 

Submission guidelines

 

Contribution type: proposals for a 15-min paper to be presented at the conference either in person or online.

 

Submission: please send a 250-word abstract and one-page CV by 13 April 2026 to AUACConfe...@aston.ac.uk, specifying if you would be presenting remotely or in person.

 

Contact and information: Dr Ilaria Scaglia i.sc...@aston.ac.uk

 

Notifications of acceptance in the programme will be sent by 30 April 2026.

Dr Ilaria Scaglia FRHistS

Senior Lecturer in Modern History*

Head of the Aston University Archives

Aston University, Birmingham, UK

Email: i.sc...@aston.ac.uk

Webpage

The Emotions of Internationalism

*this is equivalent to Associate Professor in the USA.

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