Day 4 – Connect
JUNE 10, 2021
Ideas from Milli Prototype platform for democratizing archival description. Trying one’s hand at online annotation of archival objects. Bringing in unique challenges to ‘standard’ tools from specific archives: Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA), French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), Keystone Foundation, Whole Life Academy.
Day 5 – Explore
JUNE 11, 2021
The city is not simply a geographical location but a set of relationships in space, both within city limits and outside the city’s demarcated boundaries. This panel explores what it means to capture a city’s history through the ‘archive’. How do archives grapple with the mobility of cities and their inhabitants, who move freely between the city and its hinterland? Can a city archive aspire to be more than just a repository of information, becoming instead an active component of the material and social infrastructure of urban spaces? This panel is an attempt at generating a critical discourse on city archives as active ingredients in a city’s collective existence. This holds true for smaller cities and towns as much as it does for the large metropolis. Archiving the city means, among other things knowing the city as a space of promise and aspiration as well as acts of everyday violence, it means learning to look at the city at different scales, and locating local histories within larger geopolitical frameworks.
Speakers:
Missing Basti Project
Malini Krishnankutty, IIT, Bombay
Siddarth S. Ganesh, QAMRA
Ayona Datta, University College, London
Day 5 – Explore
JUNE 11, 2021
Archiving is a vibrant, emergent field in South Asia. While many examples of archives and archival work outside of the bounds of the bureaucratic state exist in its history, we currently find ourselves in a new era of archival praxis, marked by the emergence of new media technology, digital humanities, and the ‘archival turn’ in social sciences and the humanities. This panel is an attempt to situate this emergent archival paradigm within the context of doing archival work in South Asia, and in the Global South more generally, by bringing together archivists working in different South Asian countries. What does it mean to do archival work in South Asian countries at this historical juncture? Are there shared concerns, challenges and promises and historically significant divergences? What can we learn from each other? We explore this central question along a number of different axes – archival standards and practices, the economics of funding, articulations of the digital and the analog, archival publics in South Asia, histories of conflict and violence, and many others.
Milli is a consortium of individuals and communities interested in the nurturing of archives. Archives enable diverse stories. This aim guides the work of the consortium, the purpose, form and content of an archive, and what environments it could nourish in the future.