State of the Archive

When: Monday, May 30, 2022, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Scape 1.02, 450 Mile End Road, London, E1 4GG

Workshop 1

A part of Memory in the Middle East and North Africa series

In recent years, political circumstances have made gaining access to state archives across the Middle East and North Africa increasingly difficult, closing off local history to many researchers, and even forcing a return to reliance on European colonial archives, with their well-known limitations. At the same time, a host of new community preservation efforts, large-scale collection and digitization initiatives, and other activist and artistic projects have sought to open up new ways to ‘archive’ the region’s past and present, and to ask what collective memory might mean outside the institutions of the state. This workshop brings together archivists and archival theorists to present perspectives on what archival work means in the Middle East/North Africa today, and what future directions it might take. The speakers are Dr Sara Salem (London School of Economics and Political Science), Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar (Queen Mary University of London)and Daniel Lowe (British Library). 

Please contact Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar via email to register your interest.

About the workshop series

This three-part workshop series focuses on three archetypal modern sites of memory production – archives, museums, and narratives – to examine how memory is mobilised and contested across the Middle East and North Africa today. The workshops will bring together academics in history and modern languages alongside archivists, curators, writers, and translators to explore questions of preservation, curation, and representation.

Co-organised by the colleagues from Queen Mary University of London Dr Afef Mbarek (History), Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar (Languages, Linguistics and Film) and Dr Rebekah Vince (Languages, Linguistics and Film).