Re-bordering the archive: European audiovisual archives and transnational entanglements
Guest editors: Alec Badenoch, Emily Clark, Yasemin Baḡcı, Marek Jancovic
Publication date: fall/winter 2023
Two decades ago, the European Union began a major effort to digitize heritage and make it available through European-scale portals such as Europeana and EUscreen. These efforts were explicitly aimed at removing barriers – both the barriers of access to the archives as well as the national boundaries of heritage – to allow for new narratives of shared experience to develop. In addition to supporting digital access, programmes such as Horizon, HERA, and the Joint Programme Initiative in Cultural Heritage have funded cross-border collaborations between researchers and archives to explore common themes and allow heritage objects to ‘migrate’ across borders with an explicit aim of building more inclusive and cohesive societies. Current pushes both to more fully address national colonial pasts as well as to decolonize heritage institutions have made addressing these borders all the more timely.
In this special issue we seek to reflect on how these changes have re-drawn the borders of audiovisual archives. Drawing on ideas of borders as complex assemblages, it seeks to understand how archival borders are shaped and transgressed by (socio)technical elements such as file formats, APIs, algorithms, and interfaces; legal and organizational elements such as collecting policies, copyright, national or European funding structures; and cultural elements such as language, discipline, professional expertise, or cultures of (re)use. Simultaneously, we are interested in how practices and processes of digitization, access, and knowledge production still run up against borders: for example, how do the limits of language, nation, mobility, discipline, and epistemology still serve to structure and border knowledge-making in the audiovisual archive? To what extent do the borders of supranational bodies such as the European Union or the European Broadcasting Union shape archival collaboration, and how do political changes such as Brexit affect these? To take these heterogeneous factors into account we particularly welcome entries that take a reflexive or (self-)ethnographic approach to exploring research and archival practices. We welcome multiple perspectives including, but not limited to, researchers, archivists, technical developers, and policy-makers, and that take on the multi-media formats supported by VIEW.
Potential topics can include:
The role of archival interfaces in shaping transnational research
Boundary objects between different groups of archival stakeholders
Perspectives such as the postcolonial, transatlantic or transmediterranean, etc. that challenge historical borderlines
Hacks, workarounds and other informal border-crossing practices in transnational archival work
Uses of audiovisual heritage in cross-border dialogues and activism, and pedagogical practice
Informal or counter-archives that challenge traditional institutional forms of knowledge production and circulation
Archives and heritage at the peripheries or changing/blurry boundaries of European geographies: regional, linguistic, political
Submission details
Proposals (max. 500 words) should be submitted by email to journal@euscreen.eu by 15 May, 2022 31 May, 2022 (extended deadline). Article proposals can (optionally) mention if they will take the form of a “discovery” (audiovisual-driven case study) or “exploration” (more traditional academic approach; for further info see https://viewjournal.eu/about/). Authors are encouraged to send in a short biography with their proposal.
A notice of acceptance of abstracts will be sent to authors by the end of June, 2022.
Articles (between 3,000 – 6,000 words) will be due on November 1, 2022. Longer articles are welcome, provided that they comply with the journal’s author guidelines (https://www.viewjournal.eu/about/submissions/).
All articles will be peer-reviewed. The issue will be published in November/December 2023.
Questions about the issue can be directed to Alec Badenoch at a.w.badenoch@vu.nl.