Columbia University, the École Normale Supérieure, PSL Université Paris, and the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales present Poetics of the Archive. This conference will be dedicated to the archives as material and symbolic space and to their social impact on our imagination, research and everyday practices. Moreover, it should interrogate the role of the archives from the standpoint of different disciplines within humanities, social sciences and beyond. One of the more interesting features of the archives in our societies is that their presence is overwhelming, yet it remains very problematic on many levels. Therefore, the main question we will ask concerns the social role of the archives in the contemporary culture, in both scientific and public contexts. We consider that our work in the humanities and the social sciences shape the public’s image and conception regarding the actuality and the social performances of the archive –a metamorphic archive that works under the premise of its capacity to organize, catalogue, preserve, and reuse all sorts of interactions, either written or unwritten (like the archives of unwritten verities in Common Law).
For more information, including the program and speaker list, please visit the conference website.
