Deadline is coming up for Hope in the Archives Peitho cluster!
Ruth Osorio, PhD
Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies
Old Dominion University
Pronouns: she/her/hers
We wanted to share the call for proposals for a Peitho Cluster Conversation about feminist archival methods, to be published in 2025. Proposals are due January 31, 2024. (The full timeline, from proposal to estimated publication, is below.) You can find the full CFP here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p2J46dUBfvDM6p0cR3Qh93qdyH0xtXBoevCCywm8R5Y/edit.
Please send proposals, questions, and inquiries to the editors at hopeinthearchivescluster.
Sincerely,
Lamaya Williams, Old Dominion University
Ruth Osorio, Old Dominion University
Megan McIntyre, University of Arkansas
Cluster Conversation CFP
(Re)Writing our Histories, (Re)Building Feminist Worlds: Working Toward Hope in the Archives
Editors:
Lamaya Williams, Old Dominion University
Ruth Osorio, Old Dominion University
Megan McIntyre, University of Arkansas
“Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. […] Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.” —Rebecca Solnit
In 2018, Cheryl Glenn wrote, “The work of feminist rhetorical historiography is far from done; in fact, it has just begun–and it is anchored in hope.” Following Glenn, we wish to explore hope as a methodological imperative in the archives. In a time of environmental destruction; white supremacist violence against Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; eroding access to abortion services; government attacks against trans and queer youth; ableist responses to a mass disabling pandemic, hope is not easy. Overlapping forms of oppression require a rigorously intersectional framework for cultivating hope. Informed by theorists Paulo Friere, bell hooks, Rebecca Solnit, and Cornel West, the editors envision hope as a radical orientation toward building new worlds and a willingness to do the work to make those worlds possible. And following the models of Jacqueline Jones Royster, Charles Morris, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, and others, we see archives and archival methods as a particularly valuable part of doing such work. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues in Decolonizing Methodologies, “To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things” (36). Archives and archival methods are vital to creating such alternative histories and knowledges.
We believe that archives can help us learn how to do the work of hope in a time of despair. That hope is not based on a credulous belief that archives offer unmediated access to histories and experience. Feminist writer Rebecca Solnit explains that hope is not “a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.” Rather, she continues, hope is “an ax you break down doors with in an emergency […]. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.” A hopeful orientation to archival research, then, is not built on naïveté, but rather, requires that researchers open themselves to conversations from the past as they also interrogate the social construct of the archive and thoughtfully consider how silence(s) (Jones and Williams) and erasure (Garcia; Sano-Franchini) function in archives. Merging feminist (Enoch; Monberg; Plange; Royster and Kirsch), queer (Rawson; Morris; Bessette), critical race (Epps-Robertson; Martinez), and disability (Dolmage) rhetorical frameworks, this cluster conversation seeks to reveal the generative possibilities of hope as archival practice to unsettle oppressive ideologies while helping us build the future.
Authors might consider the following questions:
- What is the relationship between hope and despair or hope and cynicism in archival methods and projects?
- How should we think about affective, embodied experiences of feminist archival methods and projects?
- What is the role of silence and silencing in archival work? How do we represent silences fulsomely and ethically in archival work?
- What role do archival methods and projects have in recovering and prioritizing voices (including, or perhaps especially, Black women’s voices) that have been erased or silenced in official histories?
- How do we think and write ethically about and across cultures, national borders, and historical time periods?
- What role do positionality and positionality statements play in ethically doing archival research?
- What are the responsibilities of researchers who are situated outside of the group represented by the archives they study? What are the responsibilities of researchers who are situated within the group represented by the archives they study?
- How might we think about the role of coalition or community in archival research methods or projects?
- How do other critical frameworks (critical race theory, disability studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies) intersect with feminist approaches to archival methodologies?
- How do intersectional and Black feminist approaches to archival research shift our methodological perspectives? How does the construction and categorization of archives impede intersectional approaches and perspectives? How do we move beyond or trouble such categorizations?
For this Cluster, contributors are invited to submit 500-word proposals expressing how their piece will contribute to this conversation; please also include a working Bibliography of up to 150 words with your proposal. We invite a wide range of submissions, including scholarly pieces (2,000-3,000 words), teaching discussions (1,000-2,000 words), creative pieces, personal reflections (500-1000 words), and multimodal texts. We are particularly interested in projects that explicitly grapple with ethically enacting intersectional feminist methods and methodologies. We are also especially interested in featuring contributions and work from BIPOC scholars, those at HBCUs, HSIs, MSIs, and two-year colleges, as well as graduate students and contingent faculty. If you have questions or would like to brainstorm potential ideas, do not hesitate to contact the editors at hopeinthearchivescluster.
Proposed Timeline
- Proposals with Working Bibliography: January 31, 2024 submitted to hopeinthearchivescluster.
- Acceptance notifications: February 23, 2024
- Full manuscripts: June 14, 2024
- Revised manuscripts: January 24, 2025
- Estimated date of publication: March 2025
Bibliography
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Bramlett, Katie. “Stories of Filipina Suffrage: Remembering Marginal Histories in Colonial Contexts.” Peitho, vol. 22, no. 2, 2020.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Duke University Press, 2019.
Crenshaw, Kimberly. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New Press, 2019.
Daugherty, Rachel Chapman. “Intersectional Politics of Representation: The Rhetoric of Archival Construction in Women’s March Coalitional Memory.” Peitho, vol. 22, no. 2, 2020.
Enoch, Jessica. “Challenging Research Methods, Challenging History: A Reflection on Language, Location, and Archive.” Composition Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2010, pp.
47–74.
Epps-Robertson, Candace. Resisting Brown: Race, Literacy, and Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia. Pittsburgh Press, 2018.
Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope. Southern Illinois University Press, 2018.
Graban, Tarez Samra. “From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity through Metadata.” College English, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 171-193.
Garcia, Romero. “A Settler Archive: A Site for a Decolonial Praxis Project.” Constellations, vol. 2, 2019.
Jones, Natasha N. and Miriam F. Williams. "Archives, Rhetorical Absence, and Critical Imagination: Examining Black Women’s Mental Health Narratives at Virginia’s Central State Hospital." IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication vol 65, no. 1, 2022, pp. 179-196.
Martinez, Aja. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. National Council of Teachers of English, 2020.
Monberg, Terese Guinsatao. “Listening for Legacies, or How I Began to Hear Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the Pinay Behind the Podium Known as FANHS.” Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, edited by LuMing Mao and Morris Young. Utah State UP, 2008, pp. 83–105.
Morris, Charles. “The Archival Turn in Rhetorical Studies; or, The Archive’s Rhetorical (Re)turn.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs vol 9, no. 1, 2006, pp. 113–15.
Morris, Charles, and K. J. Rawson. “Queer Archives/Archival Queers.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif. Southern Illinois University Press, 2013, pp. 74-89.
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Plange, Efe Franca. “The Pepper Manual: Towards Situated Non-Western Feminist Rhetorical Practices.” Peitho, vol. 23, no. 4, 2021.
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Robinson, Franklin A. “Queering the Archive.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 195–199.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
Sano-Franchini, Jennifer. “Taking Time for Feminist Historiography: Remembering Asian/Asian American Institutional and Scholarly Activism.” Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus, edited by Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, and K. Hyoejin Yoon. Parlor Press, 2017, pp. 31-67.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Bloomsbury, 2012.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books, 2016.
VanHaitsma, Pamela and Cassandra Book. "Digital Curation as Collaborative Archival Method in Feminist Rhetorics." Peitho, vol. 21, no. 2, 2019, pp. 505-531.