Call for Proposals:“The Archive and Everyday Life” ConferenceMay 7-8, 2010McMaster UniversityConfirmed Keynotes: Ann Cvetkovich (An Archive of Feelings: Trauma,Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures), Angela Grauerholz (At Work andPlay: A Web Experimentation), Ben Highmore (The Everyday Life Reader;Everyday Life and Cultural Theory), Michael O’Driscoll (The Event ofthe Archive)This conference will bring together academics, advocates, artists, andother cultural workers to examine the intersecting fields of archiveand everyday life theory. From Simmel through Mass Observation tocontemporary Cultural Studies theorists, the objective of everyday lifetheory has been, as Ben Highmore writes, to “rescue the everyday fromconventional habits of the mind…to attempt to register the everyday inall its complexities and contradictions.” Archive theory provides ameans to explore these structures by “making the unfamiliar familiar,”hence opening the possibility of generating “new forms of criticalpractice.” The question of a politics of the archive is critical to theburgeoning field of archive theory. How do we begin to theorize thearchive as a political apparatus? Can its effective democratization bemeasured by the participation of those who engage with both itsconstitution and its interpretation? “Archive” is understood to cover a range of objects, from a museum’scollection to a personal photograph album, from a repository of awriter’s papers in a library to an artist’s installation of foundobjects. Regardless of its content, the archive works to contain,organize, represent, render intelligible, and produce narratives. Thearchive has often worked to legitimate the rule of those in power andto produce a historical narrative that presents class structure andpower relations as both common-sense and inevitable. This function ofthe archive as a machine that produces History—telling us what issignificant, valued, and worth preserving, and what isn’t—is enabledthrough an understanding of the archive as neutral and objective (andtoo banal and boring to be political!). The archive has long occupied aprivileged space in affirmative culture, and as a result, the archivehas been revered from afar and aestheticized, but not understood as apotential object of critical practice.Can a dialogue between archive theory and everyday life theory work to“take revenge” on the archive (Cvetkovich)? If the archive works toproduce historical narratives, can we seize the archive and itsattendant collective consciousness as a tool for resistance incountering dominant History with resistant narratives? While thearchive has worked to preserve a transcendental, “affirmative” form ofculture, bringing everyday life theory into conversation with archivetheory opens up the possibility of directing critical attention to boththe wonders and drudgeries of the everyday. Archiving theeveryday—revealing class structures and oppression on the basis of raceand gender, rendering working and living conditions under globalcapitalism visible, audible, and intelligible—redirects us from ourbusyness and distractedness, and focuses our attention on that whichhas not been understood to be deserving of archiving. The archiveprovides the time and space to think through a collection of objectsorganized around particular set of interests. If the archive couldgrant us a space in which to examine everyday life, rather thansweeping it under the carpet as a trivial banality, we could begin tounderstand our conditions and develop the desire to change them.How can we envision the archive as a site of ethics and/or politics?Does the archive simply represent a place to amass memory, or can it,following Benjamin, represent a site to make visible a history of thepresent, thus amassing fragments of the everyday, which can in turn beused to uproot the authority of the past to question the present? Inshort, what happens when we move beyond the archive as merely acollection and begin to theorize it as a site of constant renewal andstruggle within which the past and present can come together?Furthermore, how then does the archive as an everyday practice allow usto understand or change our perception of temporality, memory, and thishistorical moment?Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to,the following topics and questions:• The archive both includes and excludes; it works to preserve whilesimultaneously doing violence. Are the acts of selection, collection,ordering, systematizing, and cataloguing inherently violent? • The question of digitization: the internet as digital archive and thedigitization of the physical archive. Digitizing the archive renderscollections invisible and distant, yet increasingly searchable andquantifiable. Does the digitization of the archive reveal new ways ofseeing persistent power structures? Or does it hide them?• National and colonial archiving: questions of power and nationalidentity. • The utopian, radical potential of the archive as well as itsdystopian possibilities.• Indigenous modes of archiving.• Visibility and pedagogy: while the archive often works to hide,conceal, and store away, it can also reveal and display that whichotherwise remains invisible. Do barriers to access restrict thisemancipatory function of the archive?• Questions of collective memory and nostalgia (for Benjamin, a retreatto a place of comfort through nostalgia is not a political act). • The archive as revisionist history.• The archive as a form of surveillance.• The role of reflexivity with respect to the manner in which thearchive is constructed/produced/curated. • Function of the narrative form for the archive: how does the way inwhich the archive reveals its own constructedness unravel the conceptof the archive as “historical truth”?• The future of the archive: preservation and collection look forwardsas well as into the past. How should we understand the hermeneuticfunction of the archive and the struggle over its interpretation? • The relationship between the archive and the archivist/archon.• Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the archive: who speaks andwho is spoken for? • The affective relationship between the archive and the body.Following the conference, we intend to publish an edited collection ofessays based on the papers presented at the conference to facilitatethe circulation of ideas in this exciting field of inquiry. “The Archive and Everyday Life” Conference will take place 7-8 May,2010, sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies atMcMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Douglas Taylor Fund).The conference format will be diverse, including paper presentations,panels, round-table exchanges, artistic performances, and exhibitions.We encourage individual and collaborative paper and panel proposalsfrom across the disciplines and from artists and community members.  Paper Submissions should include (1) contact information; (2) a 300-500word abstract; and (3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief bio.Panel Proposals should include (1) a cover sheet with contactinformation for chair and each panelist; (2) a one-page rationaleexplaining the relevance of the panel to the theme of the conference;(3) a 300 word abstract for each proposed paper; and (4) a one pagecurriculum vitae for each presenter.  Please submit individual paper proposals or full panel proposals viae-mail attachment by October 15, 2009 to tayconf@mcmaster.ca with thesubject line “Archive.” Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats.Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all requiredinformation in one attached document).Conference organizing committee:Mary O’Connor, Jennifer Pybus, and Sarah BlackerPlease go to http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~english/Taylor_2010/index.html for additional information.