Affect and Archives

This half-day workshop will explore the current state of intersections between archival studies and affect studies with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ archival collections. The lead organizer/facilitator, Ann Cvetkovich, is the author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, which has had significant influence within archival studies from a foundation in queer and affect studies. A younger generation of scholars trained in archival studies, such as Marika Cifor, Rebecka Sheffield, Cait McKinney, Rachel Corbman, Patrick Keilty, Shawn(ta) Smith Cruz, and Jamie A. Lee, some of whom will participate in the workshop, have taken up this work and pushed it in new directions, including on-the-ground engagement with both institutional and community-based archives.

We envision a half-day workshop that will start with a panel discussion about the current and future state of work in this area. Where are we now with the institutionalization of LGBTQ+ archives? How does (queer) affect theory inform archival and curatorial practice, including creative approaches? What are the tensions and intersections between theory and practice, including within training/pedagogy in archival studies? Has Michelle Caswell’s call for more dialogue between cultural studies and archival studies (in “An Archive is not the Archives”) been addressed? (See also Cvetkovich, “The Archival Turn as Practice,” Archivaria 100 (2025).) What kinds of collaborations would we like to see going forward?

The second half of the workshop will be more interactive and audience-driven with opportunities for participants to share their interests and projects. Ann Cvetkovich, who has been leading writing workshops based in creative and affective archival practices, such as “the bibliographic altar” will also facilitate an activity that brings together writing and archival curation.

One goal for this panel is to think about pedagogy and mentoring in archival studies. What has been the importance, for example, of expanding archival studies to include training in gender, sexuality, and cultural studies and in decolonizing and Indigenous frameworks? What conversations do we want to create across disciplines and communities? We will also provide a recommended bibliography for participants, with possible suggested (but not required) reading.

Ann Cvetkovich
Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Professor Emeritus in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. She was previously Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and founding Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); Depression: A Public Feeling (2012); The High Priestess: Learning from Somatic Practice (2026, forthcoming); and she is currently completing a book called Feeling My Way Through the Archives: A Journey in Queer Method.

Marika Cifor
Marika Cifor, PHD, MLIS, is Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, where she also holds a curtsey appointment in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at the University of Copenhagen. A feminist scholar of archives and digital studies, she is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (Minnesota, 2022) over 25 publications on community archives, information activism and feminist approaches to digital technologies and cultures.

Jamie A. Lee
Jamie A. Lee is professor and associate dean for faculty affairs in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona, where they co-founded and direct co/lab: The Critical Archives & Curation Collaborative and the DS|OH: Digital Storytelling and Oral History Lab, which communicates multimodal productions research to a broader public as engaged research. Lee’s book Producing the Archival Body (2021) interrogates how power circulates in archival contexts and builds critical understandings of how archives influence and shape productions of embodied knowledge. Lee is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, archivist and scholar committed to participatory approaches to projects produced with communities.

Cait McKinney
Cait McKinney is the author of I Know You Are, but What Am I? On Pee-wee Herman (Minnesota 2024) and Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke 2020), which won the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ studies. They are an associate professor of communication at Simon Fraser University. McKinney’s collaborations with the artist Hazel Meyer explore shared attachments to queer archives through writing, performance, video, and other interventions. Recent activations of their work include the Glasgow International Art Biennial (SCT), VIVO Media Arts Centre (CA), the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (CA), and Tale of Tub (NL).

Rachel Corbman