Archival research: unravelling space/time/matter entanglements and fragments

Abstract

In recent years, archival research in the social sciences is emerging as a vibrant field of qualitative research, with contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, epistemological standpoints, theoretical insights and methodological approaches. In this article, I explore archival research strategies in life-history research, drawing on my experience of working at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin, reading the letters of Dora Carrington , an English painter, who lived and worked in the peripheries of the Bloomsbury group. The archive in my analysis is theorized as a spatial and discursive apparatus of experimentation, whose configuration has an impact on the type of data and the kind of knowledges that will derive from it. Drawing on neo-materialist approaches in feminist science studies, what I suggest is that the researcher's questions, interpretations, theoretical insights and analytical tropes emerge as intra-actions between space/time/matter relations and forces within the archive.

‘The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold’: a posthumanist performative approach to qualitative longitudinal research

“…Barad's framework is being taken up in qualitative research, with scholars developing different theoretical and methodological applications of agential realism including ways of approaching data archiving and revisiting (e.g. Tamboukou, 2014). In this article I expand on my own approach, as part of a broader programme of work in which I am seeking to develop a nonrepresentational -posthumanist performative -conceptualization and enactment of methods and knowledge-making practices (Mauthner, in press-b, in press-c).…”

Feeling narrative in the archive: the question of serendipity

“…Entities -both human and non-human -actually emerge as an effect of these intra-actions, without having stable points or positions, an argument that I have developed in relation to archival research in a previous article in this journal. (see Tamboukou, 2014a) It is in this light that we can perhaps see why or rather how amidst the pile of newspaper clips and articles that the researcher encountered on opening one of the many overflowing files comprising Bouvier's papers on her desk at the Parisian Library, she was drawn to this line, having eliminated or disregarded many others. 'We experience more than we can analyse', Whitehead has written in discussing different forms of process within the historic world.…”

Archival Practices and the Making of “Memories”

“…Tamboukou 2014). In this article we expand on Mauthner's approach to Barad's framework, and her broader programme of work that seeks to develop a nonrepresentational-posthumanist performative-conceptualization and enactment of research methods and knowledge-making practices in the social sciences In particular, Mauthner argues that knowledge-making practices (such as data curation) make realities through the specific metaphysical and conceptual assumptions these practices embed and enact (see Mauthner 2015, forthcoming b, c).…”