Unsettling Archival Research

“This book brings together an exceptionally powerful collection of essays dedicated to revealing and amending the epistemic erasures of imperial archives. Chapters present alternatives to concepts often taken for granted in archival research, they reckon with archival methodologies, and they illustrate pluriversal archival efforts and pedagogies. Important and timely, Unsettling Archival Research promises to have lasting impact on rhetoric and writing studies.”—Ellen Cushman, author of The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance

“My approach to archival work is significantly changed after this invigorating read. This collection succeeds in unsettling archives and researchers in the best ways: sharing critiques and tough questions of the field while also providing a toolkit for navigating the disruption in archives and with archivists and students. Blending a range of theories with rich and varied archival examples and classroom practices, both emerging and experienced scholars upend disciplinary knowledge and Western assumptions of neutrality, memory, and history.”—Charlotte Hogg, coeditor of Persuasive Acts: Women’s Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century
 
“This carefully constructed collection offers a welcome next step in complicating our understanding of what constitutes both archive and archival research through diverse case studies and theoretical contributions drawing on antiracist, decolonial, feminist, indigenous, and queer theories and methods. Unsettling Archival Research will assist both emerging and experienced researchers to develop more inclusive and self-reflective practices.”—David Gold, author of Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947

“Comprised of fifteen seminal contributions of original research and experiential insight/experience, Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives is especially recommended as a core addition for personal, professional, community, and academic library collections and studies lists for Library/Information Science, Library Management, and General Library Information Science collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.”—James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Midwest Book Review's Library Bookwatch

“[A] strong contribution to the growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship on archival reference, access, and use. . . . Unsettling Archival Research is an engaging and powerful contribution to public history praxis. It provides a useful entry point for readers curious about how researchers creatively work with and against archival records and materials in their own research.”—Dez Alaniz, Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation