Critical Archives: New Practices, New Interpretations and New Lives for Archival Materials

A conference to be held at Deakin University’s Burwood Campus, Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th November 2017

Recent scholarship has marked a turn away from treating archives as repositories of factual knowledge to a focus on sites of archival practices and knowledge production. Critical interest in archives also draws attention to the transformative effects of digitisation, to contradictory forces that allow archived materials to be accessed outside of the material forms that house ‘originals’, through online databases and virtual museums, while also making the management of collections precariously vulnerable to shifting regimes of governmental support. 

Informed by histories of the production of colonial knowledge, and responding to new and interdisciplinary directions in archival theory and research this conference will bring together researchers, practitioners, industry partners and creative indigenous responders to discuss the critical elements of working with and through archives in the present. 

Keynote Speakers include:  

Professor Jeannette Bastian, Simmons School of Library and Information Science, Boston USA

Professor Tony Ballantyne, University of Otago, New Zealand

Dr Chris Owen, University of Western Australia

Dr Rachel Buchanan, Curator, Germaine Greer archive, University of Melbourne

Natalie Harkin, Flinders University

Organisers: Dr Tiffany Shellam, Dr Joanna Cruickshank

Bookings are required via EventBrite

This conference is supported by the Contemporary Histories Research Group and Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University