Alternative archives: Researching politics with chunks of reality

Abstract

The challenges and opportunities of accessing empirical material present a puzzle insofar as they index simultaneously the politics of research archives and the positionality of researchers. Today, amid increasing authoritarianism, disinformation, and the obstacles created by the securitisation and privatisation of data, access to reliable information is frequently blocked or complicated by the interests of political management, corporate monopoly, and surveillance capitalism, as well as by institutional and personal constraints on researchers. At the same time, digital archives, social media, blogs, diverse global communications, and even the information management tools of authoritarian and corporate control, create innumerable alternative access points for research. In this article, we describe all of these other access points as ‘alternative archives’, and, in doing so, we also seek to highlight three overlapping definitions of their alternative status in terms of (1) empirical, (2) counter-hegemonic, and (3) epistemic meanings. We next provide five state-of-the-art examples of overcoming research obstacles due to state-of-the-world developments in surveillance capitalism, securitisation, authoritarianism, information control, and human insecurity, suggesting that we can learn from obstacles to research as well as the alternatives.