Ausschreibungen

Archiving: Who, Why, What, and How Do We (Re)Member?

29. Januar 2025

Für eine Spezialausgabe des Magazins "Theatre Survey" werden englischsprachige Beiträge gesucht, die sich mit der Archivierung und Sammeltätigkeit in den Darstellenden Künsten auseinandersetzen. Die Ausschreibung ist in englischer Sprache.

Call for Papers

“Archiving: Who, Why, What, and How do we (Re)member?”

The American Society for Theatre Researchs (ASTR) Conference 2023 had a marvelous working group on archival procedures that raised any number of political questions about who gets archived, how archival processes shape the field, why some performance materials get archived while others don’t, who makes the decisions about how and why some materials are deemed worth saving, and how the digital age has changed and will continue to determine the who, why, what, and how of archival procedures. This call for papers starts where that group left off. Questions were raised and we are now looking for possible answers from scholars who use theatre and performance archives for historical research, dramaturgy for productions, directing authentic practices, acting that ghosts previous approaches, or design that pushes the boundaries of what archived shows tell us has come before. Our goal here is scholarship about practice rather than practice as scholarship. We invite any, and all archival research modalities to question the purpose of, need for, and procedural methods on how textual and performative theatrical artifacts are stored and retrieved. Archiving demands funds, effort, both literal and metaphorical space, and of course the desire to hold onto the past(s). There is an inherent politics to who, why, what, and how production gets archived. Thus, this call for papers invites scholarship on both well and lesser-known archival locations and their means for material collection. Having relied so heavily on libraries and museums as literal archival bodies in the past, possible topics for an expanded sense of archive include the following:

  • What has changed about archival methods in a technological era?
  • Are resources easier or harder to record, who gets to make these archival decisions, and what happens when a performance goes live with no way to record it?
  • Where do oral histories fit into a highly technological age of archiving?
  • What ethics are involved in recording and providing commentary about these performances?
  • How is theatre history responsible for storing theatrical representation in ways that invite researchers rather than dismiss their pursuit of archival representation?
  • Are there living archives and how do we historically honor their messages?

These and many more questions are welcome for perusal.

Please send questions on this special issue’s topic to incoming Editor-in-Chief Telory Arendell at tdarendell@... for further clarification.  

Deadline for submission is May 15th 2025 (to be published as a special issue in the January 67.1 2026 issue)

The Call was originaly published in Theatre Survey 65.3,