Theory on Demand #52

Archiving Activism in the Digital Age

Edited by Daniele Salerno and Ann Rigney

The archiving of social movements has long contributed to their cultural impact. Given the wide availability of digital tools for the making and storing of records, ‘autonomous’ archiving is today becoming a significant part of the activist toolkit itself. In parallel, professional archiving has undergone significant change, leading to more participatory and community-based practices that belie the idea of ‘the Archive’ as an institution merely serving the interests of the state.

This collection brings together academics, archivists, and activists to explore some of the many new sites where activist archives are being produced at the present time. With case studies ranging between Turkey, Afghanistan, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, and the US, it offers new insights into the opportunities and challenges posed by digitization as well as into the tensions between autonomy and long-term sustainability. It shows above all the potential of archives to become sites of renewed critical engagement.

Edited by: Daniele Salerno and Ann Rigney
Contributors: Michelle Caswell, Özge Çelikaslan, Rosemary Grennan, Flore Janssen, Kera Lovell, Eline Pollaert, Ann-Katrine Schmidt Nielsen, Paul van Trigt, Daniel Villar-Onrubia
Cover design: Katja van Stiphout
Design and EPUB development: Klara Debeljak, Tommaso Campagna, Erica Gargaglione

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2024
ISBN: 9789083328287

Contact: Institute of Network Cultures 
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

Order a copy or download this publication at:
www.networkcultures.org/publications

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under grant agreement 788572 (Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions under grant agreement 840302 (MemoRights – Cultural Memory in LGBT Activism for Rights).

This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0./

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