DIY popular music archives and museums: Radical Archives conference at NYU

Saturday 12 April 2014

Radical Archives conference at NYU

I'm in New York City to attend the 'Radical Archives' conference presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, curated by Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh, and held on 11-12 April in the NYU Cantor Film Centre. As the first "archival" conference I have attended I was interested to see how its concerns intersected with my own approach to thinking about the DIY practices and processes of the institutions that are the focus of my research, particularly because the conference was focused on activist archives.

Of course, on seeing the program it was immediately clear that this was a conference about capital R radicalism - with papers about archiving such things as the Egyptian uprising, the Portuguese dictatorship and revolution, Occupy Wall Street, the Palestinian National Movement, the National Alliance of Black Feminists and so on. The work being undertaken at DIY archives and museums of popular music, though no less important, seemed to quickly pale in that context. Yet there was still much to take away from the papers I saw on the first day. And as I posed on Twitter: 'Radical archives are not always DIY archives, but are DIY archives always radical?'

In particular I enjoyed the paper given by Professor Anne Gilliland (UCLA) on 'A Platform for Radical Archival Description'. As Gilliland noted "archives are responsible for how people are characterised in the public mind" and so a politics of the archive is critical. For Gilliland the principles that guide radical archives are "access, democracy, love, and solidarity". Community archives, including the DIY music archives in my own research, are characterised by "alternative epistemological and value systems". Gilliland presented a comprehensive list of archival ethics towards the end of her talk but my feeling is that the adoption of such a code of ethics is a long way off in authorised/official/national collecting institutions. During question time, pearls of wisdom continued to be delivered by Gilliland namely around the emphasis on a social justice mandate for researchers of archives.

I'm now looking forward to reading Gilliland's latest book Conceptualizing Twenty-first Century Archives (Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists, 2014)

I live tweeted from the conference so for more thoughts on the Radical Archives conference check out my Twitter feed: @__sarahbaker__

About the Project

This is the official blog of the Australian Research Council funded project: 'Do-it-yourself popular music archives: an international comparative study of volunteer-run institutions that preserve popular music's material culture' (DP130100317, 2013-2015).

Enthusiasts play a crucial role in the way that popular music and its culture is remembered. This project looks at instances of community-based, volunteer run archives and museums around the world which are working to assemble material related to popular music. It explores the contributions of these 'DIY institutions' to the preservation of these artefacts for the future.

Volunteers in such archives and museums who would like to participate in the project are invited to contact the researcher, Dr Sarah Baker, for detailed information: s.baker@griffith.edu.au

About the Researcher

Dr Sarah Baker is an associate professor in the School of Humanities at Griffith University on Australia's Gold Coast, where she is also a member of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research.

Sarah is a cultural sociologist with expertise in popular music studies, youth studies and creative labour. She is the co-author of Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (with Dave Hesmondhalgh, 2011) and Teaching Youth Studies Through Popular Culture (with Brady Robards, 2014) and co-editor of Redefining Mainstream Popular Music (with Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor, 2013) and Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives (with Brady Robards and Bob Buttigieg, 2015).

Sarah is also the editor of Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together (Routledge, 2015), an edited collection that emerges from this research project on community archiving and music heritage.

Research Collaboration

This research on DIY popular music archives and museums emerges from work I did with Dr Alison Huber for the project 'Popular Music and Cultural Memory' (DP1092910, 2010-12). Over the course of that project's research, Alison and I became interested in grass-roots, community-based places of popular music collection and preservation. The emergence of the DIY institution as a developing specialised repository for popular music's material culture, and the important work of volunteers in these places, struck us as something that required further investigation.

My collaboration with Alison has provided the foundations for this new project and our work together appears in our co-authored publications which can be found in this blog's Project Library, below.