Memory, Identity and the Archival Paradigm - Final Day

The final sessions of the Memory and Identity conference in Dundee take place today and as the events draw to a close we are beginning to reflect on the highlights of the last few days. What will we remember of the conference or, indeed, what will choose to forget? How will each person reconstruct their memories to form their own record of the conference? Such issues of memory are just some of the concepts that delegates have debated and analysed.

At dinner yesterday evening the Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Pete Downes, encouraged attendees to think about the conference in the context of the City and the University. George Mackenzie, the Keeper of the Records of Scotland, asked delegates to reconcile professional theory and practice in their discussions. Earlier, Graham Dominy, Chief Director, National Archives of South Africa, considered the records of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the power of the record to challenge dominant norms, using the 1955 'Freedom Charter' as his case study. On Wednesday Terry Cook, Visiting Professor, University of Manitoba, Canada, opened the conference by asking us to consider challenges to the prevailing archival paradigm and the dichotomy between impartial archives and societal interpretation.

Already today delegates have listened to an intellectual tour de force from David Lowenthal, Emeritus Professor of Geography and Honorary Research Fellow, University College London and author of 'The Past is a Foreign Country'. In the session, chaired by Professor Chris Whatley, Vice-Principal, University of Dundee, he explored the nature of remembering and forgetting, the issues associated with these acts and emphasised that mistrust is an important aspect of interrogating the archive; 'we should mistrust the documents in archives as much as we trust them – we can only mistrust them properly when we understand why they were preserved, for whom and what’s missing'.

The remaining sessions will focus on conceptions of memory and identity beyond the written word and the relationship between the archive and the historian in the making of history.

It has been a wonderful three days and we would like to thank all the speakers and delegates for making the event so successful and for 'birling' around the dance floor during a Strip the Willow last night with such unbridled enthusiasm!

Conference Tweets

Today is the second day of our Royal Society of Edinburgh supported conference 'Memory, Identity and the Archival Paradigm'. The twitter hashtag for the conference is #CAIS10 and you can see a feed of all the tweets with that tag here.

Search Room Closure (Memory, Identity and the Archival Paradigm Conference)

The Archives search room will be closed during the CAIS Memory and Identity conference, 8-10th December, which is being held in the Apex Hotel. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Conference delegates will be aware of the severe weather conditions currently affecting the United Kingdom and the east coast of Scotland in particular. However, the current forecast is that conditions will improve over the course of the week and thus we are confident that the conference will go ahead as planned.


The conference will draw together speakers and presenters from all corners of the globe and the impressive programme is available here:

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/cais/memoryandidentity/programme.htm

Memory and Identity

This is a week of anniversaries - as well as celebrating the 4,000th unique visit to the blog earlier in the week, this is our 100th post. I wonder how many of them you remember (as you'll see from the screen shot below the blog used to look quite different)? Those of you who aren't familiar with ARMMS or CAIS will have created and recreated your own view of our department while reading through our posts. Even those of you who know us well will have had your perceptions of 'us' altered by the blogs, and these will continue to change each time you remember what you have read.



This interplay between memory and identity, and the impact on these of archives and records, is the theme of our Royal Society of Edinburgh Arts and Humanities Network Project. This is the second RSE award that we have received and we were delighted that the current funding enabled us to extend the research generated by the Investigating the Archive Project. Caroline Brown attended a Research Awards Reception at the RSE last week where she gave a poster presentation about the Memory and Identity project. In addition Pat Whatley has been asked to speak about the Network Award at an RSE Research Awards in Arts & Humanities Information Evening in October.

Over the next few months we'll be returning to this theme regularly and we'd welcome any comments that you have. Our conference in December is a culmination of a series of workshops and lectures relating to Memory and Identity and will look particularly at the following areas:
- Value, Appraisal and Theories of Identity and Memory
- The Impact of Description on the Archival Record
- The Act of Display and Interpretation in the Creation of Memory
- Records and Truth: the Creation of Community and National Identities
- Everyone their Own Archivist – an Eternal Verity or a Digital Virtue?
- Activating the Archive: A Site for Creative Exploration
- Beyond the Written Word: Recording Memory and Identity
- The Making of History: Archives and the Historian

Watch out for more blog posts on these and other issues soon.