The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York (ART) is pleased to announce "Practitioner: Archival Futures in an Age of Transformative Change," a three-day symposium coinciding with the 2021 NYC Preservation Week. Unfolding through conversations, panel discussions, film screenings, and interactive sessions, the symposium will emphasize the importance of archival ethics and the embedded knowledge of both archivists and the communities they document, in an exploration of how technologies evolve and permeate cultural production and its archival corollary of digital stewardship.
Registration is free and open to all. Advance registration is required for some events.
Reparative archival work often draws our attention to the peripheries of historical memory. Those who critically engage archives necessarily contend with gaps and silences within the historical record, the elisions and erasures that evoke power structures and social hierarchies, while suggesting subjects and lived experiences hovering just out of view. The awareness of lost historical memory and attendant desire to excavate it spans the academic and the personal, with practices that mirror this spectrum of inquiry and care.
As digital collections and platforms have proliferated, so too have digital practices of reclamation and self-representation. Formal and informal digital archives have become a means of mending the historical fabric and creating space for counter-narrative. This has vitally reshaped our notions of equity and access in the digital sphere, and their afterimage in our collective digital memory. Taken up by artists, activists, academics, and communities, these archives extend beyond institutional bounds to powerfully center marginalized stories and identities.
The program will open with a conversation with archivist T-Kay Sangwand, Librarian for Digital Collection Development at UCLA, and ART President Amye McCarther. Drawing on her recent article, in which Sangwand positions preservation as an inherently political act, the conversation will explore contributive justice as a decolonizing strategy in transnational digital collections work and archivists’ role in envisioning and enacting sustainable and liberatory archival futures.