The Ontology of the Archive

This first seminar will focus on examining conceptualisations of ‘the archive’ across disciplines. The friction between the novelty of the archive for social scientists, and the very ordinariness of the archive for historians, seems a productive tension with which to start. The sense that the archive is the site of the trace of the old, the place of collective memory, underlies anxieties about the suitability of the archive for researching the sociological present. Questioning assumed temporalities of the archive seem key to unpacking our understandings of the possibilities of archival research. As well as examining the key disciplines engaged in archives, we will also consider the impact of the work of Foucault and Derrida on archives, and Latour and ANT on laboratories, and those informed by these theorists across disciplines. Whether the archive is understood as a place, a site of texts and artefacts where history is documented or as a process whereby knowledge is produced through the assemblage of artefacts, archiving techniques and disciplinary research practices, the aim will be to unpack how these different ontologies of the archive inform how the possibilities of archival research are imagined.