Radicalizing the Politics of the Archive: An Ethnographic Reading of an Activist Archive
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Les dbats portant sur l'aspect politique des archives se centrent surtout sur le rle des archives dans la production du savoir.La critique se concentre souvent sur le contrle de l'information exerc par les archives et sur son utilisation pour maintenir le pouvoir de groupes privilgis.Au coeur de ces dbats, on discute souvent des archives institutionnelles (par exemple : le gouvernement, les universits, les organisations professionnelles) et, par consquent, le pouvoir archivistique est conu en gnral comme une domination.Dans cet article, je cherche imaginer autrement l'aspect politique des archives partir de la perspective des archives autonomes et partir des pratiques archivistiques des activistes afin d'explorer le pouvoir archivistique comme une force habilitante.Je m'inspire des enqutes sur le terrain de la 56a Infoshop Archive et du Southwark Notes Archive Group, tous les deux de Londres, en Angleterre.En me servant d'une approche ethnographique, je me concentre sur la cration des Archives et sur leur activation dans les luttes politiques, en examinant les liens entre l'action d'archiver, la production du savoir et les pratiques politiques.Je soutiens que les archives autonomes et activistes resituent les archives comme site cl du pouvoir politique, tout en renversant le rle des archives comme outil de domination.En collectivisant la production du savoir et en fonctionnant comme espaces de responsabilisation, ces archives radicalisent l'aspect politique des archives et, de faon plus vaste, pointent vers des possibilits pour les politiques dmocratiques.ABSTRACT Debates about the politics of the archive centre largely on the archive's role in knowledge production.Often critiques focus on the archive's control of information and its use in maintaining privileged groups' power.Within these debates, it is often institutional archives (e.g., government, university, professional organizations) that are discussed and, as a result, archival power is largely conceived of as domination.In this article, I seek to re-imagine the politics of the archive from the perspective of autonomous archives and from activist archival practices in order to explore archival power as an enabling force.I draw upon fieldwork at the 56a Infoshop Archive and from the Southwark Notes Archive Group, both in London, England.Using an ethnographic approach, I focus on the formation of the Archive and its activation in political struggles, examining the relationship between archiving, knowledge production, and political practices.I argue that autonomous, activist archives reaffirm the archive as a key site of political power, yet at the same time they subvert the archive's role as a ARChIvARIA 80 (Fall 2015): 33-57 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists -All rights reserved tool of domination.By collectivizing knowledge production and operating as spaces of empowerment, these archives radicalize the politics of the archive and point to possibilities for democratic politics more broadly.1 Activist archives emerged throughout the 20th century from across the spectrum of social justice movements in Canada and around the world.Activist collections can be found in institutional, professional, and grassroots archives, with some existing exclusively online and others only in hard copy.A few examples from Canada are the collections of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, accessed 18 June
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it