Unfamiliar Archives: A Roundtable on Estrangement, Secrets and Loss

This article documents the roundtable “Unfamiliar Archives,” which took place as part of a two-day event to mark twenty years of Cultural Politics. Drawing from a range of “archives in the making” related to activists, artists, social theorists, and digital media practices, the participants reflect on the political, ethical, and epistemological provocations offered by their specific archival encounters. In particular, the participants reflect on the way their experiences of negotiating archives were inflected by their own initial unfamiliarity with the norms and protocols of archival research. To conceptualize these experiences, the participants orient their discussion around three terms that, they suggest, are generative for evoking the cultural politics of contemporary archives: estrangement, secrets, and loss.