Unsettling Archives

The 2022 conference Unsettling Archives focuses on the relationship between narrative and material accounts of the body and the frictions that unsettle and confirm gendered and racialized certainties about archival knowledge production. This includes work with material objects, classificatory orders, and the narrative, socio-material, spatial, and temporal constellations that configure archives and questions concerning memory. How do we deal with the upsetting and violent effects of archive formation and what are possibilities of rendering unstable, unsettling hegemonic archival practices? How can we re-imagine archival methodologies? Can we conceptualize the body as archive or architectures and spaces as unsettling actors of history and memory? What is the role of the personal in counter-archiving? Re-imagining here means reading both with and against the grain, focusing on the postcolonial entanglements and the sexual politics that any form of archiving entails.

Location: Senate Hall (Senatssaal), Main Building, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin

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View the abstracts

See the program in the poster/flyer

Thursday, July 7th 2022
 

9:30	Coffee
10:00 – 10:30	Welcome and Introduction (Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Silvy Chakkalakal, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Wallace Best, Princeton University)
10:30 – 11:30	Panel 1  Absence and Abundance in the Archive
	Agata Dziuban (Jagiellonian University) and Todd Sekuler (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)  The Politics of Absence: Withholding and withdrawing stories from the European HIV/AIDS Archive (EHAA)Pawel Leszkowicz (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)  The Biggest Curatorial Challenge: Queering National MuseumsChair: Adela Taleb (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
11:30 – 12:00	Coffee break
12:00 – 13:30	Panel 2   Archived Bodies and Bureaucratic Governance
	Madison Wolfert (Princeton University)  Gendering “Improvement”: Race and Labor in the Early American ArchiveJasper Verlinden (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)  Suspicious Narratives: The Body as Archive in Edith Eaton’s WritingKiel Ramos Suarez (Linnaeus University/Lund University)  Colonial Archives and Philippine LGBTIQ History-WritingChair: Wendy Warren (Princeton University)
13:30 – 15:00	Lunch break
15:00 – 16:30	Panel 3  Architecture as Archive: Temporal Politics of Space
	Dennis Ohm (McGill University, Montreal)  Architecture and Queer Temporality on New York’s WaterfrontSina Holst (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)  More-than-ruins, less-than-buildings: On the more-than-human, material, and imaginative composition of architectural archivesImad Gebrayel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)  When Shadowplays Shadow Place: Embodied Negotiations of Memories in SonnenalleeChair: Silvy Chakkalakal (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
16:30 – 17:00	Coffee break
17:00 – 18:00	Keynote Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University)  At the Utopian Margins of the Flesh: Nao Bustamante with Geo WyethIntroduction: Eva Boesenberg (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
18:00	Reception

Friday, July 8th 2022
 

10:00 – 11:30	Panel 4 Cripping Archival Experience, Cripping Experiential Archives
	Jiya Pandya (Princeton University)  Prosthetics, Petitions, and Paisa: Reading Transnational Disability Management Through the UN IYDPCatherine Clune Taylor (Princeton University)   Who Needs the Birth Control Pill? Intersex Women and Hormone Replacement Therapy Milena Bister (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)  Welfare Categories: Classification Processes and Their Effects on Shaping Experiences and Archives of Social InequalityChair: Beate Binder (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
11:30 – 12:00	Coffee break
12:00 – 13:30	Panel 5  Narrated Bodies and Autofictional Knowledge Production
	Alexis Ferguson (Princeton University)  Narratives of Sex: Reading Gender in 19th Century PhysiologyAnja Sunhyun Michaelsen (Braunschweig University of Art)  Her Shape and His Hand: Postcolonial Bodies in the Archive of Intercountry AdoptionChair: Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
13:30 – 15:00	Lunch break
15:00 – 16:00	Panel 6  Archives of Abjection: Narrating Resistance Through Anger  and Disgust
	Anne Potjans (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)  Anger – Abjection – Empowerment: Archival Practices and Black Female Subjectivity in the Poetry of Wanda ColemanSusanne Klimroth (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)  Hans Henny Jahnn’s Medea Between Racist Misogyny and Empowerment – Corporal Disgust as Aesthetic Tilt FigureChair: Ulrike Vedder (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
16:00 – 16:30	Coffee break
16:30 – 17:30	Round table conference reflection Wallace Best and Tera Hunter (Princeton University), Silvy Chakkalakal and Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
17:30 – 18:00	Strategic Partnership Meeting (non-public)

Saturday, July 9th 2022
 

15:00 – 16:30	Private guided tour at the SMU (Schwules Museum Berlin/Queer Museum) by Thao Ho Exhibition “Encantadas” – Lützowstraße 73, 10785 Berlin
16:30 – 18:00	Panel 7  Archiving Queer BIPOC Histories (Public SMU Program)
	Roundtable with:  Peter Rehberg (SMU), Thao Ho (SMU), Tarek Shukrallah (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
18:00	Farewell