The University of Exeter's Heritage Collections and Special Collections host this internal* seminar event, looking at the issues and debates surrounding records research and record-keeping.

Speaker 1 - William Gallois: Do we need a moratorium on colonial history?

Archives have the capacity to provide endless materials for scholars of imperialism and coloniality. The scale of information gathering in empire was so extensive that, especially in an age of digitisation, there is no conceivable end to the goal of documenting and analysing the structuring of forms of injustice or the fabrics of colonial control, alongside the making of comparisons of imperial world-making in particular places across distinct moments.

What, though, might archives offer to today's scholars if they were not primarily mined as bodies of evidence which reinforced that which we already know, but seen as repositories in which other modes of life might be recovered? If the virtues of colonial and imperial history have reached a point of emptiness, how might the harder work of exploring the lives and cultures of colonised peoples be centred and spoken of in the world today?

Bio: William Gallois is Professor of Mediterranean and Islamic History at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies

Instagram handle: @thepaintersofthecity

Speaker 2 - Annie Price:

Cataloguing is the process of creating formal descriptions to represent archive materials, enabling people to find, search and use archives for research, inspiration or enjoyment. The legacy of colonialism has had a lasting impact on the ways archives have been catalogued, both in terms of what has been catalogued and how it has been catalogued. Recent years have seen a growing awareness within the archive community of issues with traditional approaches to cataloguing, as well as a greater interest in ethical cataloguing practices, especially in regard to culturally sensitive materials.

The University of Exeter Library's Special Collections looks after more than 470 archives and archival collections, for which descriptions are available to browse via an online catalogue. This presentation will discuss recent work undertaken to identify insensitive descriptions, offensive language, bias and erasure in our catalogues, as well as the measures that have been taken to provide access to our archives in a more accurate, sensitive and respectful way.

Bio: Annie Price is an archivist at the University of Exeter Special Collections.

Twitter handle: @_annierprice @UoEHeritageColl

Speaker 3 - James Downs:

Exeter University has almost fifty different archives categorised as relating to ‘the Middle East’, while the Arab World Documentation Unit (AWDU), also housed in the Old Library, contains some 100,000 items. Together, this comprises a large amount of printed and manuscript material that, while rich and diverse in its subject coverage, reflects the interests, histories and perspectives of those who have created, catalogued and curated these collections.

What challenges and responsibilities are involved in managing specialist collections such as these? What can an archivist do to encourage more diverse approaches to use of these collections, in terms of cataloguing, promotion, and working with university staff, students and external researchers?

Bio: James Downs is Archivist of the Middle East Collections, Project Manager for the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) and acting librarian for the Arab World Documentation Unit (AWDU)

Twitter handle: @james_al_downs @UoEHeritageColl

Speaker 4 - Diana Valencia-Duarte:

From a Latin American perspective, I recognise decolonial research as that research and knowledge building practice which acknowledges and even promotes alternative epistemologies and recognises them as equally valid to a scientific or, in our case, historical work. This implies sentipensar (thinking/feeling) outside the box of the Western/Anglo-centred/Euro-centred historical tradition. This represents a challenge for the archive, which is itself a bastion of the colonial historical tradition based only on the written material. When I speak of 'colonial tradition', I am not referring to the Colony as a timeframe of domination, but to its legacies which have created contemporary colonialisms or colonialities. Contemporary colonial thinking is still today sometimes imposed as a revealed ‘truth’ upon alternative ways of seeing the world and creating knowledge such as decolonial feminisms, Indigenous, Black or Afro-descendant, peasant and popular epistemologies. Therefore, a decolonial historical research challenges - and obviously does not reproduce - those contemporary colonialities of being, power and knowledge when we plan, conduct or publish the research.

Along my talk, and considering the previous paragraph, I would like to address questions such as: How do I approach archives as a decolonial historian? How are voices of the 'otherness' present in archives that they have not created? And what are archives, what constitutes an archive, is it only written material? Can we think of the oral traditions as a form of archive, albeit uncategorised and uncatalogued? How might we avoid epistemic extractivism and the epistemicide in our research?

Bio: Diana Valencia-Duarte (Ella/She/Her) is a PhD candidate in History in the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on peasantries and is based on oral memory, environmental history and decolonial, participative, and interdisciplinary approaches.

Twitter handle: @DIANA_VAL

*This event is for University of Exeter staff/students ONLY. If you are not a member of the university please do not register.

Confronting the Colonial Archive