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How to Curate a ‘Living Archive’: The Restlessness of Activist Time and Labour

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Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

Abstract

This chapter contributes to the much-needed task of theorising the intersections between activist memory, social media platforms, autonomous archives and public history institutions. Tracking invocations of the ‘living archive’ across archival forces connected to the Egyptian Arab Uprising, Occupy and the anti-Trump Women’s March On movement, this chapter provides an emergent theory and methodology of archival assemblages. Drawing attention to issues of activist time and labour within these assemblages, this chapter argues that ‘living archives’ operate as nodal and cluster points within wider digital media and memory ecologies. As sites of uneven political discourse and practice, living archives enable protest memories to become newly available both as creative materials for civic engagement and as unintended materials for state appropriation and repression.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A considerable body of scholarship documents the left’s ‘counter culture of remembrance’ (see Cohen, 2018), including how social movement actors engage with questions of history, legacy and heritage. It is also more or less widely recognised that social movement organisations are frequently committed to creating their own ‘autonomous archives’ (Moore & Pell, 2010), which perform as sites of identity concretion, knowledge transmission, and as an evidence base to challenge dominant narratives of power.

  2. 2.

    As with any digital content, ‘living archives’ that are digital-born or migrated online are susceptible to removal or expiration; websites fall out of subscription, website managers leave projects and institutions refresh their web architecture. The internet is full of broken links and dead pages. This occurred with the #searchunderoccupy website—online at the start of this research project, no longer digitally available when it came to finalising the publication. The lesson here is not to be seduced by the terminology of ‘living archives’; these sites are as vulnerable as all digital content. A digital memory researcher can safeguard against such disappearing research materials by consulting the WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive, and creating screenshots and text files of online content in order to ‘back up’ their research materials and archives.

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Acknowledgements

The research for this chapter was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R004889/1) Afterlives of Protest Research Network.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Red Chidgey

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  1. Red Chidgey
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Correspondence to Red Chidgey .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Samuel Merrill

  2. Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Emily Keightley

  3. Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Priska Daphi

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Chidgey, R. (2020). How to Curate a ‘Living Archive’: The Restlessness of Activist Time and Labour. In: Merrill, S., Keightley, E., Daphi, P. (eds) Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_9

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