The Political Life of Documents: Archives, Memory and Contested Knowledge
Friday, 15 January 2010 to Saturday, 16 January 2010
Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

Friday, 15 January



08:45 - 09:30
Registration and Welcome


09:30 - 13:15
Panel I: Documents as Political Struggle


09:30 - 10:00
Greg Rawlings (Anthropology, Otago, NZ)
Statelessness, Citizenship and Annotated Discriminations: Meta Documents, the United Nations and the Aesthetics of the Subtle in Colonial Contestations of Human Rights

10:00 - 10:30

Catherine Trundle (Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ)
Searching for culpability in the archives: Commonwealth nuclear test veterans’ claims for state compensation

10:30 - 11:00
Chris Moffatt (Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, LSE)
Creating a 'Ché for India': Transnational Libraries and Post-Colonial Trajectories in the Prison Diary of Bhagat Singh

11:00 - 11:15 Coffee break

11:15 - 11:45
Sas Mays (English and Linguistics, Westminster)
Documents, Accumulation, and the Politics of Unfinishedness

11:45 - 12:15
Discussant: Hildegard Diemberger (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

12:15 - 12:45
Questions and answers


12:45 - 13:30 Lunch


13:30 - 17:15
Panel II: Documents as Testimonies, Truth and Affect


13:30 - 14:00
Nayanika Mathur (Anthropology, Cambridge)
Paper tigers

14:00 - 14:30
Fiona Murphy (Anthropology, National University of Ireland)
Archives of sorrow: A discussion of the relationship of the archive to trauma, memory, loss and reconciliation in an Australian context

14:30 - 15:00
Marc Aymes (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris)
Archive Trouble: Documentary Currencies Counterfeited in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire

15:00 - 15:15
Coffee break

15:15 - 15:45
Anita Prazmowska (History, LSE)
Oskar Lange – a multifaceted biography

15:45 - 16:15
Silvia Posocco  (Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck)
Expedientes: fissured legality and affective states in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala

16:15 - 16:45
Discussant: Yael Navaro-Yashin (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

16:45 - 17:15
Questions and answers


17:30 - 19:00

Keynote address at Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Room 9
Ann Stoler
(Anthropology, New School NY)
Retracing the Imperial Modern: The Carceral Archipelago of Empire

Note different venue for this lecture!


19:00 - 19:45

Drinks reception, CRASSH
For conference participants and delegates only


Saturday, 16 January


 

09:00 - 10:00

Keynote address at CRASSH
Christoper Andrew
(History, Cambridge)
The use and non-use of classified archives with particular reference to MI5

10:00 - 10:15
Questions and answers




10:15 - 13:00 Panel III: Working in Sensitive Archives: the Art of Access, Creation and Use


10:15 - 10:45
Christopher Kaplonski (Anthropology/MIASU, Cambridge)
Archived relations: repression, rehabilitation and the secret life of documents in Mongolia

10:45 - 11:00 Coffee break

11.00 - 11:30
Peter Jackson (International Relations, Aberystwyth)
Working with the archival material of intelligence and security agencies of Britain, France and the US: comparative perspectives

11:30 - 12:00
Thushara Hewage (Anthropology, Columbia)
Secrecy and Authority: Archives of the 1971 Insurrection in Sri Lanka

12:00 - 12:30 Discussant: David Sneath (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)

12:30 - 13:00 Questions and answers


13:00 - 13:45
Lunch


13:45 - 17:30
Panel IV: Rethinking Archives, the Public Sphere and Databases


13:45 - 14:15
Mark Turin (Museum of Arch. and Anth., Cambridge)
Digital Documents and Himalayan Heritage: the Politics of PDFs, Collaborative Collections and Vanishing Videos

14:15 - 14:45 Conor Galvin (College of Human Sciences, University College Dublin)
Creatures of an outward digitality: documenting the self as transigent product & project – an elision of commitment to truth?

14:45 - 15:15 Gemma John (Anthropology, Edinburgh)
Reading the life in documents: Freedom of Information Legislation in Scotland and Decisions over Public and Private

15:15 - 15:30 Coffee break

15:30 - 16:00
Jie Yang (Anthropology, Simon Frasier University)
The dang’an ‘personal dossier’

16:00 - 16:30

Noel Lobley (Ethnomusicology, University of Oxford)
Recording the Vitamins of Music - Hugh Tracey's 'The Sound of Africa' Series and the International Library of African Music

16:30 - 17:00 Discussant: Christopher Kaplonski (Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge)
17:00 - 17:30 Questions and answers


 


 
Back to event listings
Event Pages
Related Links
The Political Life of Documents: Archives, Memory and Contested Knowledge