Workshops

leftove.rs: Digital Repositories and Disseminating Ephemera

leftove.rs is a shared online archive documenting radical, anti-oppressive, and working class movements through the ephemera they leave behind: posters, pamphlets, zines, and campaign materials tracing histories of resistance from below.

The project grew out of thinking through ways of building a digital archive that doesn’t just mirror an archive catalogue, but prioritises dissemination and use over classical forms of preservation, and uses the reproducibility and mobility of digital objects to favour circulation and open access over rights restrictions.

In this workshop we’ll give an introduction to leftove.rs: the open-source platform used to build it, how it builds an archive of archives, and our more experimental metadata categories.

The workshop will be presented by May Day Rooms, London.

Archival Practices in Community Development

(working title)

This contribution to the network programme at the FICEDL convergence explores current practices in a community action-oriented degree program at the University of Glasgow (Scotland). The workshop outlines existing practices utilised within community development courses related to theory and in-depth case studies, asking how effectively existing tools enable students and educators to sincerely, yet critically, record radically-inclined community movements as they occur today. It details how, through collaborative undertakings engaging both the student and their communities of place, interest, and, usually, of practice, we engage in what McCracken (2017) termed ‘community driven participatory archiving’ — producing zines, written blogs, podcasts, mapping exercises, etc. We’re able to emphasise the benefits of creative approaches to documenting and archiving, whilst stressing the methods as ‘a vital tool for promoting accountability and preserving evidence of abuses’ (Jasper-Ikpendu and Mainga, 2024). It’s from this starting point that the workshop will pose questions to archivists and other attendees over the possibilities for recording, analysing, and archiving contemporary community development within higher and further education, and collectively explore opportunities for our learners to take their work beyond the academy.

As the call for participation stressed, ‘archival issues and questions related to the construction of memory are ever-increasing, even outside strictly anarchist or militant circles’; thus, whilst we anarchist educators find ourselves disparately employed throughout the education sector, there are opportunities for liberation-oriented pedagogies across our fields. McCracken (2017) has proposed efforts that situate ‘Archives as Activism’, suggesting a dual purpose of this framing — ‘1) Archival material being used as evidence in activism campaigns’ and ‘2) Archives disrupting social norms by collecting and archiving the work of those outside of mainstream society’. Our academic practices currently encourage students to meet with organisations either individually or in groups, immersing themselves in their practice, as ‘[w]hen communities create, select, and preserve their own records, it becomes possible to form a more complete and accurate history of their members’ lives and experiences’ (Ng, 2015). The outcome of this is not, as Randall Jimerson (2017) proposes, that ‘[a]ll aspects of society should be documented, not simply those where power has traditionally resided’, but that, at the very least, communities wishing to document their practice have the opportunities and means to do so. Via this workshop, help us explore mechanisms for meaningful archival work with our learners.

Presented by Ray Di Marco Campbell (he/they), Lecturer in Community Development, University of Glasgow · ORCID