Featuring a wide array of perspectives, Transforming the Authority of the Archive details new roles for archives in undergraduate pedagogy and new roles for undergraduates in archives. While there has long been a place for archival exploration in undergraduate education (especially primary source analysis of items curated by archivists and educators), the models offered here engage students not only in analyzing collections, but also in the manifold challenges of building, stewarding, and communicating about collections. In transforming what archives are to undergraduate education, the projects detailed in this book transform the authority of the archive, as students and community partners claim powers to curate and create history. Contributions to this volume represent a range of institutions including small liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, Ivy Leagues, large research institutions, and community-based collections. The assignments, projects, and initiatives described across this volume are fundamentally concerned with the challenge to model digital archival collections so as to center individual and community voices that are historically under-engaged in the archives. To address this challenge, contributors describe various approaches to substantively, often radically, redistribute archival resources and authority. The chapters within Transforming the Authority of the Archive offer thoughtful and creative pedagogical approaches to counter the presumed neutrality of the archive and advocate a shared understanding of the contingency of archival collections. This book is a must-read for liberal arts faculty, graduate students, archivists (both community- and institutionally-affiliated), information-studies professionals, librarians, and other professionals working and teaching in archives, museums, libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth? Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.

Although there have been significant strides to transform the demographics of archive and museum personnel, develop new museums and heritage institutions and heritage training initiatives in post-apartheid South Africa, the Eurocentric model of the archive, museum and heritage sector has largely remained intact. Despite the euphoria around the transformation of heritage in the beginnings of post-apartheid South Africa, it can be argued that the transformation of heritage institutions has been superficial and cosmetic with the ideological foundation of the colonial archive and museum, as well as Eurocentric modalities of heritage education remaining solid, largely unmoved, and under continuing challenge. This is the thrust of this book which reflects on the transformation of archives, and museum and heritage education in South Africa and argues for meaningful transformation of the sector through a decolonisation from its Eurocentric mooring.

The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn. Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Kate Clark, Ann Cvetkovich, Carolyn Dinshaw, Kate Eichhorn, Javier Fernández-Galeano, Emmett Harsin Drager, Elliot James, Marget Long, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Daniel Marshall, María Elena Martínez, Joan Nestle, Iván Ramos, David Serlin, Zeb Tortorici

A history of comic books from the 1930s to 9/11.

"Inclusion” is a word, a concept, a value, a set of practices, but what should it mean for museum staff and leaders as they envision new ways of being a museum in an emergent future? Political and environmental upheavals, and now a global pandemic, are transforming the museum landscape forever. How can our paradigm for understanding inclusion continue to transform as well? This book offers a new paradigm for understanding inclusion grounded in a retrospective of museum worker efforts to test the limits of inclusion, a reflection on inclusion’s advantages and limitations in practice, as well as the integral concerns of racial equity and social justice. Questions throughout the book invite readers to reflect on how their own experiences can add to, and expand on, new ways of thinking about inclusion in museums. Museum workers and lovers can use this book as a tool for engaging with “inclusion” anew, and as a terrain for collaborative inquiry and world-building that can help us imagine and realize new potential for museums in the future.

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science and history. Together, they shed light on concepts key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today.