The international conference “Writing the Archives III: The Poetics of the Archives” will take place at Colombia University, on 26 and 27 October 2018.

Organized by

• Roland Béhar (ENS-PSL)
• Annick Louis (Université de Reims-CRAL)
• Jesús Velasco (Columbia University)

Presentation

This third conference will therefore 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 feature 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 like to ask is about 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).

Participants

Marie-Jeanne Zenetti (Université de Lyon 2), Jesús Velasco (Columbia University), Agnieszka Karpowicz (Warsaw University), Piotr Kubkowski (Warsaw University), Judith Revel (Paris Nanterre), Graciela Montaldo (Columbia), Malgorzata Mazurek (Columbia), Reinhold Martin (Columbia), Aurélie Vialette (Stony Brooke), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia), Esteban Buch (EHESS), Nuria Martínez de Castilla (EPHE), Roland Béhar (ENS).

 
Institutions

PSL – EHESS – Columbia University-NY - ENS – Institut Polonais de Culture, Université de Varsovie