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An in-depth exploration of the ethical issues involved in collecting, preserving, researching, and exhibiting collections and archives.

Featuring insights from a range of scholars and collection practitioners, Unearthing Collections reconsiders the ethics of collections and archives through the lens of temporality. The volume explores the concept of “unearthing,” meaning the extractive process of uncovering the unknown, and advocates for processes of “re-earthing” to foster new ethical approaches among archivists and museum professionals in preserving and engaging with remnants of the past. It examines a diverse selection of case studies—from film and photography to medical history, geology, and contemporary art—to demonstrate how ethical challenges intersect across different types of collections and archives. 

HONORABLE MENTION, 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award in Edited Collection!

A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies.
 
What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.
 
Unsettling Archival Research is one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to unsettle and counteract racist, colonial histories, confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival methodologies, and chart a path for the future of archival research otherwise. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline’s assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.
 
Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.
 

In essays covering five centuries of British imperialism and a variety of genres and forms, the contributors to Up Against the Archive make the case for experimental historical writing as a way to work through the gaps and erasures of imperial archives. Drawing on Black feminist theory and Saidiya Hartman’s method to “creatively disorder the institutional fictions and the violent abstractions authorized as fact and truth,” they challenge ways of knowing and telling inherited from British imperialism. Each contribution centers on a distinct archival object or moment in time, exploring ways of understanding historical subjectivity from means and material not included or legible in the traditional archive. In Up Against the Archive, interdisciplinary scholars meet the challenges of our contemporary moment with inventive forms of storytelling that suggest possibilities for doing empire history in an anti-imperial mode.