Archival research

re·frac·tion      

/rəˈfrakSH(ə)n/

noun PHYSICS

  • the fact or phenomenon of light, radio waves, etc. being deflected in passing obliquely through the interface between one medium and another or through a medium of varying density.

 

Archival research here is not your typical filling and searching of available materials from

But rather taking of the dust from personal archives 

It asks Thomas’s work of bearing witness refashions the ends of anthropology from the construction of inert archives of human difference to affective archives of violence that call forth an “ethical disposition beyond the political, one that seeks to probe and acknowledge the extent to which we are complicit in its reproduction” (220). To bear witness, then, is to critically inhabit the world in the wake of terror.

We are proposing Soja’s Thirdspace as a frame where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” (1996)  

 

Different mediums and interferences  

The sociological imagination, as a way of connecting biography with history and making visible the connection of  cultural configurations, the systems and signifiers that marks time and space.

method as a practice of bearing witness that refuses an assumption of unmediated access to a quintessential ethnographic subject