Year: 2023
Type: editorial
Abstract: She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies.Her research investigates how individuals and communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV-status are represented and how they document and represent themselves in archives and digital cultures.She is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).In Viral Cultures, she examines the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive.Her archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators utilize these records to build upon the cultural legacy of 1980s and 1990s American AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that undergird current AIDS crises.She analyzes the power structures through which these archives are mediated, positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, reanimating the past in the digital age.She also has published widely in critical information studies, gender and sexuality studies, and American studies on topics including affect and archives, feminist data studies, and community-based information practices.Cifor co-edited a 2018 special issue of Archival Science on Affect and the Archive, a 2019 issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies on Neoliberalism, and a 2020 special issue of First Monday on HIV/AIDS and Digital Media.At the iSchool, Cifor is co-founder of AfterLab and affiliated with the DataLab and the Technology and Social Change (TASCHA) group.She is also a member of the interdisciplinary Border Quants: Feminist Approaches to Data, Bodies and Technologies Across Borders research team she is working to develop feminist data studies. 1 Carolina Alves: Marika, you describe yourself as a "feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies."For some time, it has been the majority view (from a traditional archival perspective) that the archival professional should be "neutral" and "impartial."When you declare yourself a feminist intellectual, this mark becomes determinant to the understanding of your political position and your understanding of the field of archives.Would you comment on how your position has influenced your theoretical and methodological approaches?Marika Cifor: Thank you so much.I love this question.I think that, for me, there is a great reason why I put feminist in front of how I describe my work as a researcher in archival studies, as well as in digital studies.Because for me, I do not see archival work, or archival scholarship, or the intersections of those two things as neutral or objective.We obviously come from a long history of investment (sometimes for good reasons) in notions of neutrality and objectivity, but my perspective (informed by feminism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, and other forms
Authors: Marika Cifor, Carolina Alves, Martina Spohr
Language: Portuguese
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4377238548