Who Do Archives Think They Are? : Rules and Archival Encounters

“Institutional archives are assembled around bodies of documentation that construct their realms of influence and activity. Standards, government policies and strategies speak a complex powerful language that shapes the work that archival practitioners do and feel able to do.

This paper will explore the wide-ranging influence of this documentation on the ways diverse LGBTQ+ perspectives encounter (and are encountered in) archives in institutional contexts. It will argue that the concept of archival heritage in England and Wales is reinforced by an authorising discourse about what archives are and can be, what they do and why they have value.

Engagement and public participation are often explicitly referenced in the documentation, only to be undermined by the implied rules of the broader framework. Whereas some values and experiences are given legitimacy others are excluded or misrepresented.”

Victoria Hoyle

Victoria Hoyle is a PhD researcher at the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past at the University of York, and is a practising archivist. Her research focuses on archives and heritage values and is part of an AHRC funded project called Within the Walls: Heritage Values and the Historic City. It looks at the ways in which archives are understood, created and valued by archives practitioners, communities of identity and communities of place.

Twitter: @Vicky_Hoyle

The University of York is home to IPUP: the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past. IPUP is a research centre established to study the meaning of the past in the present. Its research explores how the past is used by individuals and communities to create identity: this involves studying the ways in which the past is understood and contextualized in order to interpret the present and to mediate traumatic or contested pasts.

Victoria will be speaking on day 3 of the conference