ACA@UBC 14th Annual International Seminar & Symposium

As an online event, attendees and presenters will be coming from many different places around the world. We wish to expressly acknowledge that the University of British Columbia School of Information is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

Theme: “Archives Unbound: Redefining Archival Concepts and Practice”

What does it mean to shift a paradigm? The dominant paradigm for archives centres impartiality, neutrality, and objectivity. Yet, as Michelle Caswell notes in Urgent Archives (2021), archival communities of the last decade have demonstrated a firm commitment to critiquing, unraveling, and reimagining this model. Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook (2002) write that while “old scripts are…still influential in the daily performance of archival work,” “new intellectual (theoretical) spaces are opened by…transgressive performances” (173; 177). At this two-day event, we will ask: how might it look to do archives differently? 

The 14th annual ACA@UBC Seminar and Symposium, Archives Unbound, dedicates time and space to exploring the plurality of the archival field. This virtual event will bring together students, scholars, and practitioners whose work challenges dominant archival paradigms, and who reimagine and redefine archival concepts and practices. In addition to panels on records and archives that fall outside of Eurocentric definitions, this event will facilitate conversations around digital archives and the ethics of digitization, archiving current events, archival businesses, and archival commitments to Truth and Reconciliation. Through virtual discussions and presentations, speakers at the ACA@UBC Seminar and Symposium will unbind our conceptions of what archives are, what they can be, and how they can be developed and cared for. 

This online event will include one seminar day and one symposium day.

The seminar will take place on Friday, February 10th, 2023 from 9:00 to 4:00 p.m. (PT). It will consist of interactive discussion panels on the following topics:

• Digital Archives,
• Ethics of Digitization,
• Archival Entrepreneurship, and
• Archiving as it Happens.

The symposium will take place on Saturday, February 11th, 2023 from 9:00 to 3:30 p.m. (PT). It will feature formal conference-style presentations on the following themes:

• Student Voices,
• Archives and Activism,
• Records and Memory, and
• Truth, Reconciliation, and Archives.

For more information, please also see the event website and the ACA@UBC website.

Accessibility notes: We will provide live captioning for both days of the event.

Additional notes: Revenues from ticket sales support our ability to pay speakers an honorarium, cover the cost of live transcription, and facilitate the continued sustainability of our ACA student chapter. 

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at aca.slais@gmail.com.