Archives are in the business of collecting and preserving records for research. These are records that can be instantiated and are readily accessible and utilized through well-defined channels of retrieving and validating information as evidence, which are often connected to legal and bureaucratic domains of power. What happens when refugee memories and subjectivities are placed front and center of such established archival theory and practice?
This forum, organized by the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC), the IHRC Archives, and the University of Minnesota Libraries, will explore the tension between “actual records” and “imagined records,” to borrow Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell’s framing, and make it productive for an alternative mode of evidentiary capacity-building to emerge. Can refugee memories and subjectivities help articulate the life of an archive, one that can “motivate, inspire, anger and traumatize” rather than merely perpetuate its existence and legitimacy as a system devoid of reflexivity?
1:00-1:15 Welcome Remarks by Dr. Yuichiro Onishi, IHRC Acting Director, and
Ellen Engseth, IHRC Archives Curator
1:15-2:30 Keynote
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-4:15 Roundtable Discussion
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- Dr. Thuy Vo Dang
- Dr. Jessica Lopez Lyman
- Daniel Necas
- Moderators: Dr. Anne Gilliland
4:15-4:30 . Closing Remarks
Presented by: Immigration History Research Center, Immigration History Research Center Archives, and University of Minnesota Libraries
Co-sponsors: Departments of History, American Studies, and Chicano & Latino Studies, the Asian American Studies Program, and the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality (RIGS) Initiative