Papery Graveyards: Sense and Silence With Archives

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the problematics of engaging with archives. In exploring how nonexperts may come to a new topic and area to ask pertinent questions, this article seeks to put to work the author’s own reflexive engagements with an archive. The archives drew the author in both material and bodily senses and invited thinking about how we might reuse data or at least reengage with materials. The article challenges notions that reflexivity is circular or upholds sameness and proposes that the movement is iterative and one which seeks critical engagement with difference.