Program
The program can be found here.
Overview
The Association of Canadian Archivists Student Chapter at the University of British Columbia (ACA@UBC) is delighted to present its fourteenth annual international Seminar and Symposium, Archives Unbound: Redefining Archival Concepts and Practice, which will be held virtually from February 10 to February 11, 2023.
The event will feature a Seminar-day and a Symposium-day. The seminar consists of interactive panels with a range of international speakers, while the symposium features presentations in which speakers express their personal opinions and share their experiences. Students, academics, and professionals are invited to attend both events and to actively participate.
Seminar (Friday, February 10, 9:00–4:00 PST)
Symposium (Saturday, February 11, 9:00–3:30 PST)
What does it mean to shift a paradigm? The dominant paradigm for archives centres impartiality, neutrality, and objectivity. Yet, as Michelle Caswell notes in Urgent Archives (2021), archival communities of the last decade have demonstrated a firm commitment to critiquing, unraveling, and reimagining this model. Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook (2002) write that while “old scripts are…still influential in the daily performance of archival work,” “new intellectual (theoretical) spaces are opened by…transgressive performances” (173; 177). How might it look to do archives differently?
At the 14th annual ACA@UBC Seminar and Symposium, Archives Unbound, we dedicate time and space to exploring the plurality of the archival field. This two-day virtual event will bring together students, scholars, and practitioners whose work challenges dominant archival paradigms, and who reimagine and redefine archival concepts and practices. In addition to panels on records and archives that fall outside Eurocentric definitions, this event will facilitate conversations around digital archives and the ethics of digitization, archiving current events, archival businesses, and archival commitments to Truth and Reconciliation. Through virtual discussions and presentations, speakers at the ACA@UBC Seminar and Symposium will unbind our conceptions of what archives are, what they can be, and how they can be developed and cared for.