This seminar centres the study of labour and status in the history of one archival institution – the Uganda National Archives. It argues that a colonial preoccupation with hoarding paper away from suspect publics not only reflected a (continuing) legacy of state archival suspicion; it also buttressed archives as sites of struggle over the status of archiving labour and of research labour in the production of scholars, archivists, administrators and archival publics. These are not abstract processes on paper, but rather are conducted in the material work of making, claiming and using archival spaces and institutions. In Uganda, struggles among people, paper and an assortment of pests and particles that sustain archival life are conducted in tension and collusion with state power that is characterized by ambivalence to archival authority. The publications upon which the seminar is based show how durable histories of status, labour and institutional memory in archival institutions are not primarily reducible to their effects on academic knowledge or public access.
Edgar C. Taylor is on the faculty of the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Makerere University. His research examines histories of urban culture, racial politics, and institutional life in twentieth-century Uganda. He has co-edited Reading Archives, Memory and Method from Makerere University: Debates and Insights (Makerere University Press, 2025), Decolonising State and Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge and Public Life (James Currey, 2022) and a special issue of History and Anthropology entitled ‘Expulsions: Knowledge, Memory and Materiality in Africa’ (2024). He has also worked under archivists, records officers and librarians across Uganda cataloguing government archival collections. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, and an MA in History from Makerere University.
For information contact Katy k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk
The Dreyfus Room is on the second floor with no lift. Please contact Katy with any accessibility issues.
Facilitated by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership between Birkbeck, University of London, Queen Mary University of London and History Workshop.
