Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Michelle Caswell “Owning Critical Archival Studies: A Plea” Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) July 2016 Kent State University Thank you all for being here today. The title of my talk was initially “Critical Theory and Its Archival Applications,” but now I’m going to backtrack on that title and instead call this presentation “Owning Critical Archival Studies: A Plea” because that is what I am going to provide you with today, a plea that I hope becomes a pledge. Theory has an unfairly bad reputation for being obscure, impenetrable, and useless, so I am going to do my best today to make a solid, crystal clear practical case for the utility of theory. I am also going to be upfront that, while my research spans both empirical social science methods and critical analytical humanities methods, my original academic training is in the humanities— in religion and South Asian studies-- and I am most at home in that paradigm. I want to be unapologetic about that, and to assert that humanities research is research, research that examines what it means to be human in critical and analytical terms rather than empirical terms. I want to make four main points with my talk today. First, is that critical theory has much to offer archival studies. Secondly, archival studies has much to offer critical theory. Thirdly, that we might term the combination of critical theory and archival studies “critical archival studies,” and finally, that we, as a field, take ownership of and leverage the term “critical archival studies” to
Author: Michelle Caswell
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2578984102