Facing the Future (with an eye on the past)
Some other possible titles:
Facing the future: museums, archives, therapy. Inventing a temporally inflected historiography.
Dealing with an uncertain past in order to work in an uncertain future
For a once and future archives
Part of the AHRC
Care for the Future Research Theme
"The future is certain. Only the past is unpredictable." USSR graffiti 1980s.
Broadly the idea behind this program of workshops is to explore
symmetries and asymmetries between futures, presents and futures (all
plural). So although we are at a present moment between many pasts and
unknown futures, we are also (now) part of the past of future presents,
just as we were the future of a past present. To help anchor us and
guide us through the dangers of open philosophizing, we will concentrate
on archives in general and contentious archives in particular (archives
of contentious events/periods). And we will consider how today we can
think about future historiography – building digital archives is
possibly more difficult than conventional paper based ones.
Two background papers (on very different topics)
Zeitlyn, D. 2012. 'Divinatory logics: diagnoses and predictions mediating outcomes',
Current Anthropology, 53(5): 525-46. DOI: 10.1086/666829
Zeitlyn, D. 2012. 'Anthropology In and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts.
Archives as Anthropological Surrogates', Annual Review of Anthropology, 41: 461–80.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721
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