This collection of highly readable essays reveals that research is not restricted to library archives. When researchers pursue information and perspectives from sources beyond the archives—from existing people and places— they are often rewarded with unexpected discoveries that enrich their research and their lives. Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process presents narratives that demystify and illuminate the research process by showing how personal experiences, family history, and scholarly research intersect. Editors Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan emphasize how important it is for researchers to tap into their passions, pursuing research subjects that attract their attention with creativity and intuition without limiting themselves to traditional archival sources and research methods. Eighteen contributors from a number of disciplines detail inspiring research opportunities that led to recently published works, while offering insights on such topics as starting and finishing research projects, using a wide range of types of sources and methods, and taking advantage of unexpected leads, chance encounters and simple clues. In addition, the narratives trace the importance of place in archival research, the parallels between the lives of research subjects and researchers, and explore archives as sites that resurrect personal, cultural, and historical memory. Beyond the Archives sheds light on the creative, joyful, and serendipitous nature of research, addressing what attracts researchers to their subjects, as well as what inspires them to produce the most thorough, complete, and engaged scholarly work. This timely and essential volume supplements traditional-method textbooks and effectively models concrete practices of retrieving and synthesizing information by professional researchers.

The first book to focus on the experience of LGBT archival research. Out of the Closet, Into the Archives takes readers inside the experience of how it feels to do queer archival research and queer research in the archive. The archive, much like the closet, exposes various levels of public and privateness—recognition, awareness, refusal, impulse, disclosure, framing, silence, cultural intelligibility—each mediated and determined through subjective insider/outsider ways of knowing. The contributors draw on their experiences conducting research in disciplines such as sociology, African American studies, English, communications, performance studies, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies. These essays challenge scholars to engage with their affective experience of being in the archive, illuminating how the space of the archive requires a different kind of deeply personal, embodied research.

Archives have never been more complex, expansive, or ubiquitous. Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction is an indispensable research and reference book: a hugely helpful guide to archives in the twenty-first century. Material discussed ranges from medieval manuscripts to born-digital archival content, and art objects to state papers.

In recent years, digital technologies have become pervasive in academic and everyday life. This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of concepts for studying the new cultural dynamics that are evident as a result of digitisation. It considers how the cultural changes triggered by digitisation processes can be approached empirically. The chapters include carefully chosen examples and help readers from disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology, Media Studies, and Science & Technology Studies to grasp digitisation theoretically as well as methodologically.

In the age of ubiquitous access to information, library special collections and archives have received renewed attention through digitization projects designed to share collections with the world at large. Yet these materials also offer opportunities for student learning through direct engagement with rare or unique items. While special collections and archives have largely been used by advanced researchers and scholars, an increasing number of undergraduate courses are taking advantage of these materials as guides in the instructional process.

This book explores the growing significance of veganism. It brings together important theoretical and empirical insights to offer a historical and contemporary analysis of veganism and our future co-existence with other animals. Bringing together key concepts from geography, critical animal studies, and feminist theory this book critically addresses veganism as both a subject of study and a spatial approach to the self, society, and everyday life. The book draws upon empirical research through archival research, interviews with vegans in Britain, and a multispecies ethnography with chickens. It argues that the field of ‘beyond-human geographies’ needs to more seriously take into account veganism as a rising socio-political force and in academic theory. This book provides a unique and timely contribution to debates within animal studies and more-than-human geographies, providing novel insights into the complexities of caring beyond the human. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in geography, sociology, animal studies, food studies and consumption, and those researching veganism.