Thursday November 19, 2020
4:00pm EST, via Zoom
Dr. Jamie A. Lee, Assistant Professor of Digital Culture, Information, and Society in the School of Information at the University of Arizona.
Producing the Archival Body draws on theoretical and practical research conducted within US and Canadian archives, along with critical and cultural theory, to examine the everyday lived experiences of archivists and records creators that are often overlooked during archival and media production.
Expanding on the author’s previous work, which engaged archival and queer theories to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology that intervenes in traditional archival practices, the book invites readers interested in humanistic inquiry to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, the author introduces new understandings of archival bodies. Contributing to recent disciplinary moves that offer a more transdisciplinary emphasis, Lee interrogates how power circulates and is deployed in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities.
Lee directs the Arizona Queer Archives, the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab, and co-directs the Climate Alliance Mapping Project. They are an award-winning social justice documentary filmmaker, archivist, and scholar committed to decolonizing methodologies and asset-driven approaches to community participatory projects that are produced with communities in ways that will be relevant and beneficial.
The reading will be followed by a discussion moderated by Jeanie Pai.