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I'm truly thrilled to share my paper, "How Do You Repair a Broken World? Conflict(ing) Archives after the Holocaust." This paper examines the methodological, political, & ethical dilemmas of working with documents produced by victimized populations https://rdcu.be/b59Og
Specifically, I examine conflicts in France, the US, & Israel in the wake of the Holocaust over who got to possess documents produced by murdered Jews as well as how these documents ought to be classified, e.g. as part of an assimilationist, diasporic, or national narrative.
As a result of examining these debates, I derive 4 lessons for social scientists who work with archives, especially conflict archives, and *especially* conflict archives produced by victimized populations (these are discussed on pp. 338-340):
https://rdcu.be/b59Og
https://rdcu.be/b59Og
1. Scholars must historicize the archives they work with to know which docs are available & why. Archives are sites of inclusion & exclusion that elevate some voices & versions of history implicitly in the documents that are readily available, while others are excluded from view.
2. Archives must be historicized lest social scientists reproduce past politics unknowingly in their research. Archives reflect contemporary political issues that concerned their founders...
....Our analyses must therefore distinguish between what happened and how what happened has been preserved and presented. The latter inevitably bears on our work but is frequently unattended to in historical social science.
3. Archival research often relies to a certain degree on serendipity: the surprising discovery of unexpected sources that change the nature of a research project. But, inevitably, serendipity is harder to come by when...
...researchers are blind to the logics of categorization and classification that organize their archives and the documents they wish to work with. Hence, knowledge of what motivated the construction of an archive & its sorting & selecting of documents provides scholars with...
...the opportunity to use archival gaps or silences as clues for where to look. Similarly, the silences can provide clues about whose perspectives were considered valuable enough to preserve & index while others were never collected, neglected, or possibly even destroyed....
...Without this background knowledge, a scholar might miss seeing the silences altogether. Historicizing the archive can increase one's chances of making an unexpected discovery or, at least, question why some perspectives are “unavailable” to be discovered in material form.
4. Archives themselves are sites of knowledge whose history can bear on questions of interest to social scientists. Particularly in the case of victims’ conflict archives, we may wish to problematize the standard focus on dominant versus marginalized voices to examine how...
....even within marginalized communities, multiple perspectives exist on what forms of knowledge matter, whose voices ought to be elevated or suppressed, and the purpose of sharing evidence of violence in the first place...
...Survivors don't always have the same goals nor even the same understandings of who their community comprises. They aren't a homogenous group but rather have diff. positionalities based on distinct experiences that have led them to imagine different ways of preserving the past.
The paper, again, is here, and I very much look forward to any & all feedback. Special thanks & profound gratitude to @dsharnak, @jaredgmcbride, my favorite historians, for their genuinely helpful insights...
https://rdcu.be/b59Og
https://rdcu.be/b59Og
...to Claudio Benzecry, Andrew Deener, Sunmin Kim for their comments as well, and to the always excellent audience at @socscihist for their great questions back when I presented this work at the conference in November.
Also, I would be remiss not to encourage you to check out the other outstanding papers in this issue by @claytonchirping, @E_Schneiderhan, @nickhwilson, @akmskarpelis, @bsarge, Chandra Mukerji, Abigail Calonga, @IrredeemablyNBA, Sunmin Kim, & @nickhwilson: https://link.springer.com/journal/11133/43/3
Finally, this paper was inspired, in part, by @laiabalcells & Christopher M. Sullivan's fantastic @JPR_journal issue on Conflict Archives, linked below, as well as @MilliLake, @se_parkinson, @kcroninfurman, & @SusannaCampbell's ongoing commitment... https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jpra/55/2
... to considering the ethical implications of various methodological practices in social science research on violence, which you can learn more about here: https://advancingconflictresearch.com/ (no seriously, check this out).
Last but not least, if you haven't yet read @suboticjelena's similar paper that was published just a few weeks ago (great minds think alike??), please do. It's excellent: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022343319898735
