Archiving Activism in the Digital Age: Introduction

The archiving of social movements has long contributed to their cultural impact. Given the wide availability of digital tools for the making and storing of records, ‘autonomous’ archiving is today becoming a significant part of the activist toolkit itself. In parallel, professional archiving has undergone significant change, leading to more participatory and community-based practices that belie the idea of ‘the Archive’ as an institution merely serving the interests of the state. In our introduction we bring together memory, social movement, media and critical archival studies to offer a new perspective on archives and archiving as a tool for activism in the digital age. Furthermore, we provide an overview of the collection, which brings together academics, archivists, and activists to explore some of the many new sites where activist archives are being produced at the present time. With case studies ranging between Turkey, Afghanistan, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, and the US, the contributors offer new insights into the opportunities and challenges that digitization presents as well as into the tensions between autonomy and long-term sustainability. They show above all the potential of archives to become sites of renewed critical engagement.