Seminar Series "Inimkond/Humankind" Presents Dr Österlund-Pötzsch, Dr Uusihakala

You are invited to our upcoming Inimkond seminar entitled

Ethnography in the archives: some observations, reflections and case-studies

which will take place on 26 March at 6 p.m. in room A447 (Tallinn University Astra building).
This session will be a dialogue between two speakers:
Katja Uusihakala (University of Helsinki) and 
Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch (Society of Swedish Literature in Finland)

Please also see:

https://www.facebook.com/events/672481022816587/

Abstract:

To be able to access material in national archives, to participate in and to have one’s own heritage preserved in archives are fundamental democratic rights. However, as pointed out by Michel Foucault, the archives are intersections for political power and (historical) knowledge. “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory”, Jacques Derrida (1995:4) contended. 
The archives are presently undergoing massive changes, primarily through large-scale digitalization projects, the introduction of more efficient databases and the demands of collecting digital data. Consequently, new doors have opened for researchers to access and work with archive material. In this seminar we would like to briefly look at some of the possibilities and challenges of working with archive material, focusing on various types of silences in the archives. 
We will then move on to consider a few case-studies in which archive material plays a vital role. A shorter example will look at aspects of movement and embodiment in fieldwork situations based on a material of 19th century fieldwork diaries. A more in-depth presentation concerns the research project "Fairbridge Memories: Notes on tracing the history of British child migrants", which examines social memories of a child migration scheme that aimed at permanently resettling white British children to colonial Southern Rhodesia during 1946-1962. The study explores how Empire building as cultural and political formation provoked distinct migrant subjectivities and how the former migrants retrospectively make sense of their transient past and belonging. The study also serves as point of departure for considering the methodological challenges in conducting historical ethnography of migratory experience. 
  

About the presenters:

Katja Uusihakala is an adjunct lecturer and postdoc researcher atthe Department of Social Research (Social and Cultural Anthropology) at the University of Helsinki.

Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch is an an archivist and postdoc researcher at the Archives of Folk Culture (at the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland) in Helsinki. 

 
About the seminar series:

Inimkond: Current issues in anthropology and beyond
fortnightly on Wednesdays, 18.00 – 20.00
full program at http://www.tlu.ee/en/estonian-institute-of-humanities/Anthropology/inimkond

This seminar series features speakers from anthropology and related fields, and fosters discussion of their research with a transdisciplinary audience. It aims to contribute to the culture of academic scholarship and debate at Tallinn University. Speakers include both local researchers and guests from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and with various takes on anthropological theory and methods. Presentations in the seminar series will be of interest to staff and students in anthropology, cultural theory, sociology, and history, among others.