Living Archives: Mothers, Children, and Embodied Memory Work in Northern Uganda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Transitional justice and International Relations scholarship has largely discussed children—be they child soldiers, children born of war, or children more generally—as innocent, potential, or actual victims, and in need of protection, denying their agency, and political subjectivity. At the same time, knowledge production in these fields and especially our understanding of archives as repositories from which we write history, has centred on the powerful, institutional archives and written records. This article argues that women formerly abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda do memory work with and through their children born in LRA, creating a living archive that acts as anticolonial knowledge. Drawing from interviews and focus groups with war-affected people in northern Uganda and formerly abducted women, I explore how the women employ strategies such as presencing of their missing children, emplacement, embodiment, and transmission to create living archives. These living archives then provide new insights into violence’s impact on relations, time, and temporality, the work of survival and the unresolved nature of memories in the aftermath of violence. By their nature living archives are embodied, changing and open-ended, felt, lived, relational, and difficult. Ultimately, through this memory work mothers create the possibility of agency for their children, as carriers of knowledge both difficult and beautiful that can shape our understanding of conflicts, violence, and International Relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".