About the 2024-2025 theme.
Porous Archives is how I’m referring to critical research practices that allow archive content to become less “finished”. Archive content is often treated as solid, impermeable and implicitly finished because that content is considered fixed when it arrives at the archive. Aside from the interpretations applied to that content by archivists and readers in turn (which can often matter – greatly), being archived means being removed from authoring, editing, deleting, and/or replacing. Or at least, it means believing that this removal is possible and/or likely.
Making archives less finished means making them more porous (or recognising that they already are porous), a methodological and critical move of opening gaps and opportunities (pores) in the content so that it can say more, mean more, grow, and roam. What might these methodological moves by historical geographers and others look like? They could include the following…
Exporting archive content – allowing it to be read and engaged with elsewhere rather than only in the reading room. What porosities are created when archives are de-located at kitchen tables, on public transport (etc) and where content can be more easily portioned, spliced, and annotated?
Peopling archive content – enabling people to research and understand archive content who are different and perhaps more diverse than the “usual” people who conduct archive research. What porosities are created by the different thinking they bring with them, and the enablers we might put in place for them?
Extending archive content – venturing to think about what happened after the archive narrative stopped. What else would a person have done, how else would a situation have developed? And how (if at all?) do we scaffold these imaginaries with other historical/geographical knowledges?
Emplacing archive content – laying archival narratives over the places those narratives happened in (or refer to). When we do this, how are the original narratives expanded (or limited)? Does an utterance from an archive make more sense, less sense, or sense of a different kind, when researchers emplace it? And vice versa, does places make sense of a different kind for having archive narratives woven into them?
Resuming archive content – acting on the (arguably inevitable) uncertainty that archival content belongs securely in the past at all, what happens when we seek ways of connecting archival narratives to still-happening events in the present? How does this affect the narratives, how do presents become different for being (re)connected to such narratives, and how do we create and maintain those porosities?
And, importantly, this is an unfinished list. Porous Archives will happen in many other ways too, and we hope to use Practising Historical Geography 2024 to better understand these approaches (including, perhaps, the extent to which they’re agreeable, as these approaches contain the potentials to be problematic). Some of these approaches are familiar to us already: the HGRG’s research series includes, from 2007, “Practising the Archive” and again in 2013, “Collaborative Geographies…” both of which visit ideas like these. It is entirely possible that Porous Archives will create enough content for its own collection too, and it is certainly an option we’ll keep at the front of our minds.