ARA, Ireland and the School of History, UCD are delighted to welcome Dr James Lowry who will be leading a seminar on the subject of 'Archival Sovereignty'. The seminar will be structured as a 30-minute presentation followed by a 30-minute discussion moderated by Dr Elizabeth Mullins.

“I belong only to myself”, declared the anarcho-feminist Leda Rafanelli (1880-1971), whose work sought a way out of cultural and political forms of domination at a time when ethnonationalism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist and colonialist extraction were bleeding the Global South and driving the world to war. As these forms of power and force have reconfigured themselves to persist in the face of sociotechnical and technological developments, subjugation and liberation are both increasingly datafied. Information becomes more pervasively a means of and a site for claims to sovereignty; personal, communal and cultural.

This seminar will provide an overview of the recent work towards the articulation of a principle of archival sovereignty. Drawing on relevant research into blockchain, displaced archives and repatriation, digital remains, Indigenous land and data sovereignty, open government data and civic technologies, privacy and data protection, refugee rights, community archives and state surveillance, this seminar will seek to move towards a definition of “archival sovereignty” that meaningfully characterises an ethical proposition that has portability across information problems and contexts. Is it impossible to belong “only to oneself” in records? What does archival sovereignty look like and what could it mean for archival practice and the lives of the documented and undocumented?

Dr James Lowry is assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York. He is founder and director of the Archival Technologies Lab and the Archival Discourses research network.

Dr Elizabeth Mullins is the Director of the MA Archives and Records Management programme and Head of Subject for Archivistics in the School of History UCD. Dr Mullins teaches, publishes and supervises research in archival studies and medieval history. Her current research project focuses on the recent history of Catholic archives and archivists in Ireland.

Event Schedule:

14:55-15:00 Attendees will be admitted to Zoom conference

15:00-15:10 Welcome and Introductions

15:10-15:40 Archival Sovereignty: Towards a New Archival Principle

Dr. James Lowry, City University of New York

15:40-16:15 Discussion moderated by Dr Elizabeth Mullins, University College Dublin

This event is part of the ARA, Ireland seminar series, Archives and Social Justice. For more information on the other events in this series, please see our website.

Please note, the seminar will be delivered via Zoom. Registration for this online event will close at 6:00pm on Wednesday, 12 May after which point instructions for joining the Zoom video conference will be sent out to all ticket holders.