During one of my recent writing projects I started thinking about the implications of disciplinary silos and the value to reading across disciplines. A lot of my work is grounded in archival theory and public history practice, however it often intersects with the Canadian academic history profession. From an outsider differentiating these three disciplines may seem like splitting hairs, but they really are proudly different in their approaches and literature.
A lot of my recent work has been thinking about archival silences and the power relationships entrenched in colonial archival spaces. This power dynamic and the challenge of doing research about historically marginalized communities is something that intersects across archival practice, public history, and academic history. I started diving into this topic by examining archival theory and literature written by archivists. I then expanded to look at community based perspectives and a more public history take on archival voices. Lastly, after consulting with a couple of colleagues I added a stack of Canadian history books and articles to my to read pile.
This exercise in reading across disciplines was enriching and helped broaden my understanding of the topic it hand. It also highlighted how fields can approach the same topic from very different angles. Many of the archival based works I was reading focused on the role of the archivist in creating or mitigating silence within the historical process. The more public history leaning works focused on communities challenging silence, the right to internal community memory, and ways to build bridges across shared pasts. Conversely, the more academic history reads were really focused on subverting archival silences – reading against the grain, using non-traditional archival sources to expand historical narratives, and how to overcome lack of records. All of these areas of interest had overlapping points and areas of commonality.
These areas of similarity struck me as so important. Archivists and historians need to talk more. Understanding how archives work and the intellectual/emotional/physical labour that goes into making archival records accessible is so important. Historians and media indicating that something was ‘discovered in the archives’ erases the archival labour that went into arranging and describing that material. The archivist knew it was there and did a lot of work so a historian could access that material as part of their research. Historians and archivists have definite overlapping interests and we would be better served by increasing the amount of work we did collaboratively.
What are your strategies for reading across disciplines?
Photo credit: Jared Erondu on Unsplash