Dear Colleagues:
Please consider submitting a project to our proposed edited collection tentatively titled emergencyarchives24.
Sincerely,
Patty Wilde
This is an Emergency (Archive): Recording, Remembering, Resisting, Refusing Under Catastrophe
Editors: Kathryn Manis, Bibhushana Poudyal, Patty Wilde, and Ma-Ya
We begin by again recognizing the attempted genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli ethnostate (Haider, 2018; Levinsky, 2025)—a highly visible, yet heavily censored, example of emergency archiving in real time. Palestinians are documenting this effort at annihilation in persistent, brave, and sometimes not-even-intentional ways—testifying not only to atrocity but to a steadfast refusal to disappear. The persistent escalation of this violence reminds us that emergencies are not equitably experienced or managed. Hitting the world’s most marginalized and vulnerable the hardest, these moments of crisis are a corollary to the human subjugation brought upon by colonial, imperialist, white-privileging, heteronormative, classist, casteist, and ableist structures that have long organized this modern life. Premised on dehumanization and the destruction of the natural world for economic gain, these systems contribute to war and military conflict, but also global poverty, ecocide, and the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social illnesses and ailments that have come to characterize our lives.
Responding to these ongoing emergencies calls us to reimagine archives not as neutral collections or curations but as acts of survival, resistance, and insurgent memory-making (Caswell & Cifor, 2016). Through this proposed edited collection, we aim to push the boundaries of traditional conceptions of archives and its practices, making them more accessible while illuminating the ways in which people have always already been archivists. As we know, oppressed communities have long found ways to document their existence and resistance, though the mechanisms of preservation are not always recognized, respected as empirical sources of evidence, or preserved by institutional or “official” repositories. While emergency archives may not always look like archives, they document lives lived under, in, for, and during crisis. They may be a livestream. A hashtag. A grainy phone video. A disappearing story. A classroom assignment. A barricade. A whisper. A TikTok. A how-to. A we-were-here. A remember-us cry. A don’t-forget-my-name inscription. They are created before mourning, before resolution, and sometimes before safety. Subverting erasure, institutional silence, and sanitized historical record, emergency archives ask us, “How do you record an emergency before you can understand it, process it, grieve it?”
While informed by our Rhetoric Review symposium, “Emergency Archives: Investigating Rhetorical (Im)Possibility, Action, and the Impact of Precarious ‘Preservation’ Under Crisis” (forthcoming Spring 2026), this collection explores a broader range of pedagogical, methodological, affective, and everyday engagements with emergency archives. In conversation with the editors at the The WAC Clearinghouse Across The Disciplines series, we specifically aim to foreground inter/cross/multidisciplinary and extra-institutional projects that build coalitions through ongoing dialogues around rhetorical action, im/possible preservation, and memory-justice works in times of crisis. As we envision it, this open-access collection will be a place where emergency archives can live a little longer, travel a little farther, and amplify a little louder. In learning from emergency archives and how others create, use, and share them, we seek to generate mycorrhizal networks (refer to Yih, 2017) that collectively combat the myriad and interconnected existential threats we face.
Centering the construction, maintenance, circulation and usage of emergency archives across and beyond the disciplines, we welcome essays, collaborations, pedagogical pieces, multimodal or digital memory-justice projects, experimental and genre-based forms, and reflective and practice-based work on emergency archives that explore topics including, but not limited to: pedagogy/research with and through emergency archives; actionable emergency archives on/with how-to guides for surviving, resisting, and remembering the moment; feminist, queer, and decolonial archives that unsettle patriarchal, settler-colonial conceptions of time, normativity, and state power; digital/URL-based archives that resist archival boundaries, and the affective and emotional repercussions of working with emergency archives. We invite contributions that ask, engage, or speculate on questions, such as:
- How do you know you’re living through an emergency that needs archiving?
- How do you archive crisis—with what technologies, with whom, and under what conditions?
- How are coalitions formed around emergency archiving? How are they sustained—or not?
- Are emergency archives always intentional? What does it mean to archive by instinct, trauma, or necessity?
- How do emergency archives disturb the narratives of institutional memory (Zinn, 1977)?
- What is the role, if any, of the institutional archivist in a time of grassroots archival explosion?
- What are the implications of climate collapse, digital impermanence, and algorithmic erasure for archives of crisis (Punzalan & Caswell, 2016)?
- How can community-built, everyday archives shift how we understand memory, resistance, and preservation?
Submission Information:
In an effort to include a range of projects emerging from within and beyond higher ed institutions, we will accept contributions that vary in genre and length. Given the risk that may come with emergency archives, we also welcome anonymized projects and those written under a pseudonym to prioritize the safety of writers and creators in this especially perilous time. Please send roughly 500-word proposals to emergencyarchives24 by Oct 20, 2025. Include a brief description of the form your project will take, the medium you intend to use, and the estimated word count.
Anticipated Timeline
Oct. 20, 2025: Proposals due
Nov. 7, 2025: Invitations sent
Feb. 20, 2026: Articles drafts due
Apr. 20, 2026: Feedback returned
Jun. 22, 2026: Revised drafts due
Aug. 10, 2026: Submit full manuscript
TBD: Additional editorial feedback
References can be accessed at: Work cited