“Humanizing an inevitability political craft”: Introduction to the special issue on archiving activism and activist archiving
2015; Springer Nature; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1007/s10502-015-9260-6
ISSN1573-7500
Autores Tópico(s)Museums and Cultural Heritage
ResumoThe archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society.But I will stick by what I have said about other scholars, and argue that the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business.His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake.If so, the rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not, as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft (Zinn 1977).This special issue of Archival Science ''Archiving Activism and Activist Archiving'' examines the intersections between contemporary archival practice and activism in different national, political, socio-economic, technological, archival settings, and inspired by a variety of motivations and objectives.The practices examined in these articles go beyond advocacy for more active archival approaches and incorporate the spaces and endeavours where archivists seek to creatively document political and social movement activism as well as those projects which engage with archives and the archival process as part or in support of political, human right and social movement activism.
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