A Reflection on Archival Liberation and Power

In this article, the two leaders and fifteen participants in the seminar “Archival Methodologies Reimagined: Responding to Tomorrow’s Dilemmas,” held during the 2023 Summer Institute of the Rhetoric Society of America, report on three critical arcs that emerged from their investigations, together and apart. Specifically, they interrogate prior conceptions of archival liberation and power, identify several deeply embedded culturally corrective values that have tended to guide archival work in the field, and suggest an ethic of approaching the archives as “starting, not finding.”