Join Dr. Jamie A. Lee for an engaging presentation that explores archives not just as collections of documents but as living, evolving spaces filled with emotion and history.
AIAR Speaker Series
Friday, March 28
2-3p
Slonaker House
Through stories and records from community archives they founded, Dr. Lee will examine how archives shape and are shaped by the people and experiences they hold. They will discuss how touching, smelling, and interacting with archival materials can evoke deep emotional responses and reveal complex connections to identity and belonging.
This thought-provoking talk will challenge the idea of archives as fixed and unchanging, instead presenting them as dynamic spaces where history is continuously reinterpreted and transformed.
Jamie A. Lee Bio
Lee is the associate dean for faculty affairs and associate professor in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona, where they co-direct of the Critical Archives & Curation Collaborative (co/lab), which supports cutting-edge information and archival studies research that critically engages with community/institutional archives and their practices. The co/lab focuses on power as it is experienced and expressed differently in these distinct archival contexts. Inquiry into power grounds their work at the intersections of memory, storytelling, multimodal media, digital curation, and long-term preservation. Lee’s book Producing the Archival Body (Routledge, 2021) interrogates how power circulates in archival contexts and builds critical understandings of how archives influence and shape productions of embodied knowledge and human subjectivities.
ABSTRACT
Applying transdisciplinary logics and sharing records from the community archives they founded, Lee argues that the affective nature of archival productions follows the machinations of metamorphoses and (un)becoming. Although touching, smelling, and handling what remains of distinct material lives and living histories might elucidate certain affective and haptic responses, the records themselves hold their creators in tension with their relationships to belonging in the archival body.
