Niamh Moore

5 Weaving archival imaginaries: Researching community archives

Archival Research in the Social Sciences

The Archive Project

Michelle Bastian

Emma Roe

Owain Jones

Socio-environmental crises are currently transforming the conditions for life on this planet, from climate change, to resource depletion, biodiversity loss and long-term pollutants. The vast scale of these changes, affecting land, sea and air have prompted calls for the ‘ecologicalisation’ of knowledge. This book adopts a much needed ‘more-than-human’ framework to grasp these complexities and challenges. It contains multidisciplinary insights and diverse methodological approaches to question how to revise, reshape and invent methods in order to work with non-humans in participatory ways. The book offers a framework for thinking critically about the promises and potentialities of participation from within a more-than-human paradigm, and opens up trajectories for its future development. It will be of interest to those working in the environmental humanities, animal studies, science and technology studies, ecology, and anthropology.

Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds

Maria Tamboukou

Liz Stanley

Andrea Salter

Recent scholarship on archival research has raised questions concerning the character and impact of 'the archive' on how the traces of the past are researched, the use and analysis of different kinds of archived data, methodological approaches to the practicalities involved, and what kind of theory is drawn on and contributed to by such research. The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences builds on these questions, exploring key methodological ideas and debates and engaging in detail with a wide range of archival projects and practices, in order to put to use important theoretical ideas that shed light on the methods involved. Offering an overview of the current 'state of the field' and written by four authors with extensive experience in conducting research in and creating archives around the world, it demonstrates the different ways in which archival methodology, practice and theory can be employed. It also shows how the ideas and approaches detailed in the book can be put into practice by other researchers, working on different kinds of archives and collections. The volume engages with crucial questions, including: What is 'an archive' and how does it come into existence? Why do archival research and how is it done? How can sense be made of the scale and scope of collections and archives? What are the best ways to analyse the traces of the past that remain? What are helpful criteria for evaluating the knowledge claims produced by archival research? What is the importance of community archives? How has the digital turn changed the way in which archival research is carried out? What role is played by the questions that researchers bring into an archive? How do we deal with unexpected encounters in the archive? A rigorous and accessible examination of the methods and choices that shape research 'on the ground' and the ways in which theory, practice and methodology inform one another, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in archival and documentary research.

Over the last twenty years, the redevelopment of the docklands has radically altered the physical fabric and social structure of a large part of Dublin City both north and south of the river. What has happened in the city is not entirely unique and has many international parallels in places like New York, London and Sydney. This book sets out to examine how global urban influences have interacted with local processes to transform a former marginal part of Dublin city into an economically successful and vibrant urban quarter. It offers an up-to-date and detailed account of the changes that have taken place and highlights some of the difficulties encountered by a number of agencies along the way, including the controversy over the redevelopment of Spencer Dock, the problems of contamination at the Grand Canal Dock and the future challenges of regenerating the Poolbeg Peninsula. The book places significant emphasis on the politics of redevelopment and the role of particular individuals in re-shaping this urban district.

The Post-industrial Regeneration of a European City Quarter

Dublin Docklands Reinvented

Twenty years after activists set up a peace camp blocking a logging road into an extensive area of temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound, that summer of protest still holds a prominent place in Canadian environmental discourse. Although the camp was said to be based on feminist or eco/feminist principles, insufficient attention has been paid to its impact on feminism and the debates that were raging at that time. Moore sets out to remedy this through a careful, qualitative study of the peace camp. She demonstrates that the sheer vitality of eco/feminist politics at the camp confounded dominant narratives of contemporary feminism and re-imagined eco/feminist politics for new times.

Niamh Moore

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