'Archives retain a sustained gravitational pull on feminist researchers. We experience them as sites of promise and desire, even as we recognise they are also sites of power and privilege that have long been implicated in acts of violence and erasure. We celebrate the growth in online social and cultural data and the new questions, methods and debates that this proliferation supports, at the same time as we ask what feminist archival research looks like in an era when the metaphor of the archive is invoked to cover almost any kind of memory, collection or accumulation. Importantly, we also acknowledge that our work as feminists is conditioned by the tools – epistemological and technical – available to us at any given point in time. For this reason, contributors here are keen to mark out what may be novel and what is enduring in the ways in which feminist thought and feminist practice frame archives. What follows are some initial provocations along these lines.' (Editorial introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
'The Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) was established in 2000 by the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) as a response to the mounting problem of what to do with Australian women’s records in a digital and post-custodial age. This article traces the AWAP’s development within the changing context of archival science over that period. Using the insights of feminist archival theory it explores how a feminist approach to archival practice can inform thinking about how to manage community archives, empowering those who create them to participate in societal memory with their own voice and values. It shows how the AWAP is a fledgling example of where distinctions between archivist, records creator, subject and user are blurred in the quest for a space that facilitates co-creation of archival infrastructure.' (Publication abstract)
'Feminist and queer engagements with archives and archival theory have emphasised the affective dimensions of archival processes, particularly the meaning and place of archives when they concern marginalised people and intimate lives. In settler colonial contexts such as Australia and Canada, these ways of thinking about archives have been influential in responding to histories of removal, institutionalisation and abuse of Indigenous children. This article investigates the importance of feminist engagements with archives and historiography in ‘reconciling’ settler colonial states, with attention to sites of archival contention. Feminist modes of history that foreground affect in the formation of public culture need to take account of divergent views regarding the propriety of archival records in ‘reconciling’ settler colonial states. Indigenous peoples’ mistrust of state and institutional archives, demands for control of archives and legal actions for destruction of records, as well as establishment of autonomous archives, all contribute to the important and fraught process of decolonising settler colonial archives.' (Publication abstract)
