Subject: Ambivalent Archives (CRASSH's Research Network)

Description: ‘Ambivalent archives’ attends to the various affective and critical engagements with the archive which are resurgent in recent scholarship and archival practices. The name of our network reflects the many dispersed ways in which these engagements occur, whilst foregrounding our own consciously ambivalent critical position; given that archives can exclude and obscure as much as they retain, we believe that an interdisciplinary space to explore critical attitudes of uncertainty and speculation towards the archive has become necessary. Concerns at the centre of this network range from reflections on the mode of ‘critical fabulation’ proposed by Saidiya Hartman, to the archival possibilities generated by grassroots collectives such as the Bombay-based Museum of Ephemera and the London-based Archive Stories.