On Thursday 23 January 2025, The National Archives hosted the official launch of a new Bloomsbury edited collection Archives and Emotions: International Dialogues Across Past, Present, and Future (Nov 2024). The collection features a chapter I co-wrote with Professor Kevin Lu, Head of Department (Practice) at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
The collection is the first to put archivists and historians-scholars and practitioners from different settings, geographical provenance, and stages of career-in conversation with one another to examine the interplay of a broad range of emotions and archives, traditional and digital.
My chapter, Bearing Witness to the Historical Record, was the culmination of something that started in 2019 when I attended a workshop on Race and Racism at Stillpoint Spaces London. It was here I first met Kevin, however, conversations started in earnest later when we were planning a ‘test ’ event, to try out some the findings that we had initially captured via anecdote and informal feedback through a series of three workshops we put on in 2020–2021. These workshops were organised with the then Director of Stillpoint Spaces London, Dr Aaron Balick, the poetry therapist, Charmaine Pollard, and two colleagues from The National Archives, Vicky Igliowski-Broad and Kevin Searle.
The ‘test’ workshop
It was at the ‘test’ workshop in March 2023 where Kevin, I and others were able to spend time unlocking more of the effort behind the idea around processing both the histories and the emotions linked to our collection. What do I mean when I refer to histories and the emotions linked to our collection? As I wrote in a 2022 blog, ‘archives are not detached from our emotions and in that sense, they are about both facts and feelings.’
By March 2023, I had already presented to an online conference of international scholars and practitioners around the themes of emotions and archives. At these events I focused more on my public engagement and practice-based encounters as an archive professional. However, it was on the back of the ‘test’ event that it made sense for Kevin and me to collaborate in terms of writing, initially via a blog. This in turn shaped the chapter outline that we successfully pitched to the editors of the volume.
Writing the chapter
Kevin and I spent time in 2023 sharing insights from our long and varied career journeys, Kevin as an academic, and mine in cultural services. I brought two case studies to the conversation from my more recent work at The National Archives with groups and individuals exploring histories contained within our records. This allowed the chapter to start to fall into place.
Kevin and I were keen to draw out the importance of subjectivity in how history and archives need to be viewed. We saw that underpinning this was also a need to adopt a decolonial approach, while at the same time centring marginalised histories. Kevin was able to provide more of the intellectual thinking around emotions and trauma, and I was able to reflect more from a practice perspective on the encounters I, and the groups I worked with had on viewing our collection.
Our conclusions drew heavily on the ‘test’ event and very much draw upon our strong advocacy for an interdisciplinary approach to working with trauma/emotions/archives including using arts-based methodologies.
The launch event
Fast forward to January 2025, and the publication and launch of this edited collection that has become a key marker in the sand for a journey I started when I joined The National Archives in 2015. Reflecting on that time, and on encountering the Partition archive, recalled the strong emotional response it elicited. These experiences led me to reach out to others and develop two strands of work, exploring histories of Indian Indenture, and 20th century Black British History, which feature in the chapter.
As part of the launch event, a mixture of historians, archivists and archives professionals at different stages of their careers from Professors through to PhD candidates, were able to share reflections on the edited collection. The discussion focused on the two key strands in the book. The first explores the emotions locked away in the archival record itself. The second strand explores the work that takes place in archival institutions to address both the emotional labour, but also the untold aspects of these stories of working at the proverbial ‘coal face’.
During the event, we were each invited individually to give short introductions to our chapters. I spoke on the changes I have witnessed at the The National Archives as it has tried to grapple a lot more what people feel when working with archival records. It’s been great to see the kinds of developments (and not just my own) that have been coming to light across the sector. In the case of my work on archives and emotions, the opportunity to work with Kevin on our chapter has allowed me space to think more deliberately and methodologically about what we have achieved so far.
Kevin spoke about what writing the chapter had meant for him, and the space it provided to explore the productive tension between subjectivity and objectivity. His own intellectual interests in the cross over between history and psychoanalysis and how his unique contributions to the field of psychohistory found a form of ‘homecoming’ with the writing of this chapter, were moving to hear about. In concluding his introduction, he said that psychoanalysis provided a way of understanding the kinds of encounters that take place with archives, and the emotions these evoke and that it provided an initial grammar for thinking productively about these matters.
Question and answer
The question and answer section of the event was very productive, with some excellent discussion. There was discussion about the user/community researcher and the role they may play in future in contributing their many powerful reflections, and the importance of providing more of a platform for giving them a voice. There was also recognition of the importance of the volume to facilitate discussions on the topic with students and future generations of practitioners and researchers.
The effort the editors put in to make the volume as accessible as possible was also noted, for example by spending time breaking down complex ideas and inviting a broad and diverse audience to join the conversation – this was not only evident in the launch event itself, but is reflected in the collaborative nature of the edited collection itself.
One of the areas that garnered a lot of interest from a variety of speakers and audience members was on the point about care, both self-care and the duty of care. This included discussion on what are the institutional responsibilities to support people encountering the archive. In response, there was some recognition of the importance of undertaking this work collaboratively across institutions but also within institutions looking at ways students, staff, the public, and others can be properly supported as they encounter emotionally moving records.
We also discussed the role of art and creativity in allowing empathetic understanding and exploring proper research methodologies for taking this work forward. This tied in with other questions at the launch about guidance on developing ethical best practice. Pilot projects are currently being set up that aim to address some of these tricky and messy questions, drawing academia, archival institutions, communities, arts organisations and others into conversation to see what is possible.
Closing thoughts
The event closed with two sets of closing comments from Anna Sexton, Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at UCL, and Barbara Rosenwein, Professor at Loyola University, Chicago. Anna was keen to highlight the potential for the book to be used for teaching purposes, while Barbara in closing the launch event encouraged all to maintain their sense of curiosity towards an exciting and expanding field of enquiry. We were left at the end of the evening thinking of two important questions:
- What further needs to be done to design services in ways that reduce the harm that can occur through archival encounters?
- How can we lean into other emotions, and not just traumatic ones, to enrich what we understand of the field of archives and emotions?