Archiving from Below – Seminar with Rosemary Grennan

This presentation will explore the idea of “archiving from below” and how it can inform practices for building counter-archives. It will draw on the historical trajectories of community archiving, workers’ enquiry, and history from below, as well as contemporary ideas about how community archives can challenge the widespread assault on collective memory.

Drawing on her work at the MayDay Rooms, Rosemary Grennan will outline key practices around how they archive, digitise and disseminate their collections. Highlighting the primacy of use over preservation, grassroots collecting, archiving as counter-surveillance, the role of archives as social and organising spaces, and how the practice of digitisation can build solidarities across geographies.

For Peace, an archive and exhibition project that reframes peace and anti-militarist movements by examining their material histories within our increasingly militarised world. And secondly Leftovers, a digital platform that reimagines digital archives as collaborative resources for contemporary movements rather than static repositories of historical material. It explores how the platform prioritises active reuse of historical materials, innovative categorisation methods, and “sisterly archive” networks that enable digitisation exchange and mutual backup.

BIO:
Rosemary Grennan has co-run the MayDay Rooms since 2015, an archive and educational space in London that seeks to connect histories and documents of social movements and resistance to contemporary struggles. More recently she has co-founded AGIT in Berlin, a public residency space that works on archives and histories of social and labour movements.
She is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Digital Anthropology at University College London, and was recently a fellow at the Sloane Lab as part of the Information Studies Department at UCL, with the project entitled Collections of Collections: Building Common Ownership and Shared Archival Practices.
She recently contributed to the volume Archiving Activism in a Digital Age from the Institute of Network Cultures, as well as having edited a number of books and contributed to non-academic journals and magazines on the politics of archiving.