AIAR Speaker Series: Dr. Jamie A. Lee, Affect in the Archives

Jamie A. Lee, PhD is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Associate Professor in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona, where they co-direct the Critical Archives & Curation Collaborative (co/lab), which supports cutting-edge information and archival studies research that critically engages with community/institutional archives and their practices. The co/lab focuses on power as it is experienced and expressed differently in these distinct archival contexts. Inquiry into power grounds their work at the intersections of memory, storytelling, multimodal media, digital curation, and long-term preservation. Lee’s book Producing the Archival Body (Routledge, 2021) interrogates how power circulates in archival contexts and builds critical understandings of how archives influence and shape productions of embodied knowledge and human subjectivities.

ABSTRACT: In this experiential presentation, Lee invites you to explore the nature of the archival body and the ways in which it is temporally situated and yet also always in motion. Applying transdisciplinary logics and sharing records from the community archives they founded, Lee argues that the affective nature of archival productions follows the machinations of metamorphoses and (un)becoming. Although touching, smelling, and handling what remains of distinct material lives and living histories might elucidate certain affective and haptic responses, the records themselves hold their creators in tension with their relationships to belonging in the archival body.