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SUMMARY:Confronting History\, the Archive and the 'Stranger' in Educationa
 l Research - Sophie Rudolph & Jo-Anne Dillabough
DTSTART:20140716T150000Z
DTEND:20140716T170000Z
UID:TALK53416@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Kate Jones
DESCRIPTION:In this workshop\, Sophie Rudolph and Jo Dillabough would like
  to engage the Faculty of Education\, other departments and friends with p
 reliminary ideas we are working on in relationship to the concept of the a
 rchive. Neither Sophie nor I have degrees in history yet in our respective
  projects we have both been faced with dilemmas surrounding the use of the
  archive as a methodological tool for engaging in critical sociological re
 search. Sophie's current work rests upon wider questions about colonizatio
 n through educational policy in Australia and concerns about what role sho
 uld reading with\, and against\, the archive play in better understanding 
 the history of Indigenous knowledge in the Australian educational context.
  One element of my current work is concerned with the representation of ra
 cialized young people who have engaged in protests and/or 'riots' in the U
 K and South Africa from the mid twentieth century until the present. In th
 e latter project there is a focus on comparative international politics\, 
 security and policing particularly in relation to racialized youth living 
 on the fringe of global cities.\n\nOur plan at the outset is to show a sho
 rt clip from the French Canadian film entitled Leolo in which there are re
 ferences to different ideas about the archive\, the imagination and selfho
 od.  It also reflects on how these three concepts come together to reveal 
 utopian and dystopian dimensions of urban life. We do this so as to ignite
  interest in questions about what it means to confront the archival record
  in our work. We will then each give a brief 15-20 minute presentation of 
 our work and ask participants to help us bridge the various challenges the
  archive presents for all of us but also to discuss its critical uses\, li
 mitations and possibilities. We hope that participants will engage with us
  in relation to their own work and associated dilemmas and use this sessio
 n as an opportunity to think together about the various challenges and pos
 sibilities for doing work in these areas. Abstracts of our work for discus
 sion are presented below. \n\nCritical Reflections on the Archive as a Sit
 e for Interrupting Colonial Logics embedded in Contemporary Australian Edu
 cation Policy\,\nSophie Rudolph\n\nThe settler-colonial history of Austral
 ia rests on the concept of terra nullius – land of no-one – which was 
 used to justify British invasion and settlement in 1788.  This colonial de
 vice represents the concurrent acts of erasure and declarations of superio
 rity that were to characterise Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships
  into the following centuries. Historian Henry Reynolds argues that these 
 ideas became embedded in institutions: ‘the idea that Australia was wast
 e land had become a central doctrine of the colonial courts by the middle 
 of the 19th century’ (1989:67).  In this paper I examine the possibiliti
 es and challenges of archival research related to the construction of a ge
 nealogy of the notion of ‘gap’ attributed to Australian Indigenous stu
 dents through a current national policy called ‘Closing the Gap in Indig
 enous Disadvantage’.  I explore some of the ethical dimensions of archiv
 al work in this context\, the tensions and contradictions bound up in the 
 institution of ‘the archive’\, and the potential for a history of the 
 present to understand\, interrupt and challenge the power of continued for
 ms of colonial logic in contemporary education policy.\n\n \n\nRethinking 
 History\, the Archive and the Representation of Young People's Surplus Aff
 ect and Stylistic revolts on the Urban Scene\,\nJo-Anne Dillabough\n\n \n\
 n“Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?”\n\n“Yes\,
 ” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn
 ’t riot\, would you?”\n[..] “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Y
 ard\, more than 2\,000 of us\, all blacks\, and it was peaceful and calm a
 nd you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and
  looting and look around you.”\n\n \n\nDavid: There is a lot of Asian he
 re because this school is by []. ..They call us chinks and stuff like that
 . JD: Who’s the they? […] When you say they call us Chinks? David: Nat
 ive people. Yeah\, they are like get off our land and stuff. And it’s li
 ke\, for them\, there are too many of you. Then we call them a racist word
  for Native\, Jugs\, when people get pissed off and when people get mad or
  when a group beat on one guy. For being racist. JD: Who beat up who?  Dav
 id: Well then it gets complicated and it’s mixed…because some Natives 
 hate racism too! (David\, Chinese Canadian\, aged 14\, Vancouver BC)\n\nDe
 partment of Public Welfare: In the event that Displaced Persons or other i
 mmigrants coming to the attention of this Department as public charges\, s
 uch cases are to be immediately reported to the Welfare Services in order 
 that immigration authorities may be given immediate opportunity to arrange
  for deportation [].  (City of Toronto Archives\, LLP-46: 55.1 copy\, 46.2
 1\, 39.\, March 3rd\, 1950).\n\n \n\nThe above words\, some derived from a
  research interview\, some from a media account of the London Riots (2011)
  and some from archive sources convey in different ways the power of narra
 tive and the narrative imagination (see Ricoeur\, 2010) as a temporally lo
 cated strategy for making sense of the world.  In this respect\, the explo
 ration of narrative expressions constitutes a central element of the ethno
 grapher’s trade. It also\, however\, presents a number of methodological
  and interpretive dilemmas which I will discuss in this presentation. For 
 example\, such dilemmas may emerge when a young person may be interviewed 
 about\, or asked to visualize their past experience in a neighbourhood\, t
 he wider city (e.g.\, participating in a protest) or the history of one's 
 own biography in the city as a 'history from below' (see Raphael\, 2006). 
 For experienced ethnographers\, we learn that young people may often imagi
 ne they have little history to tell and/or may believe they carry little s
 ubstantial knowledge about the history of the city in which they live. It 
 may also be that some young people understand their urban history in the c
 ity as residing outside the borders of both the official and unofficial 'a
 rchive' or legitimate citizenship or that their subcultural communities re
 present a revolt into style: forms that serve to rewrite archival accounts
  about representations of youth in past time.\n\nIn this presentation\, I 
 argue that narratives expressed by young people\, their stylistic revolts 
 and associated representations in the public record always carry residual 
 meanings which operate in the present in re-appropriated forms and which s
 hape their projected futures. At the same time these narratives also speak
  back - as forms of repetition and collective and counter memories - to bo
 th the official and unofficial archive.  It is the ethnographic interpreta
 tion of these narratives\, styles and representations and their dramaturgi
 cal functions (see Goffman) that may provide one avenue for better underst
 anding how particular identity categories – such as a young person imagi
 ning he or she is Eminem or as ‘riotous rapper' - might be seen as part 
 of a larger narrative imagination and a theatre of memory (see Ricoeur\, 2
 010\; Raphael\, 2006)\; that is\, as a form of social and cultural meaning
  which carries residual effects and surplus affect into the present which 
 change the course of history.\n
LOCATION:Donald McIntyre Building\, Faculty of Education\, 184 Hills Road\
 , Cambridge CB2 8PQ
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