A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies. What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work. Unsettling Archival Research is one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to unsettle and counteract racist, colonial histories, confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival methodologies, and chart a path for the future of archival research otherwise. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline’s assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives. Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.

Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors’ auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. This builds on the argument that constructing identity is a Performing Autobiography performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric and genre. By examining the auto/biographical texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim together, the book theorizes self-representation and genres as rhetorical performances, and therefore their texts can be seen as “performative auto/biography”—transgressive archives where readers are asked to consider their own identities and act accordingly. In doing so, this book contributes to growing theories in feminist rhetorics and auto/biography studies, arguing that these performative genres advocate for life narratives as political and social activism.

Disruptive pedagogies for archival research In a cultural moment when institutional repositories carry valuable secrets to the present and past, this collection argues for the critical, intellectual, and social value of archival instruction. Graban and Hayden and 37 other contributors examine how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can successfully engage students in archival research in its many forms, and successfully model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations. Combining new and established voices from related fields, each of the book’s three sections includes a range of form-disrupting pedagogies. Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as text fosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections. Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives in which we all work. Ultimately, contributors explore archives as sites of activism while also raising important questions that persist in rhetoric and composition scholarship, such as how to decolonize research methodologies, how to conduct teaching and research that promote social justice, and how to shift archival consciousness toward more engaged notions of democracy. This collection highlights innovative classroom and curricular course models for teaching with and through the archives in rhetoric and composition and beyond.

Latin America in the 1980s was marked by the transition to democracy and a turn toward economic orthodoxy. Unsettling Statecraft analyzes this transition in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, focusing on the political dynamics underlying change and the many disturbing tendencies at work as these countries shed military authoritarianism for civilian rule. Conaghan and Malloy draw on insights from the political economy literature, viewing policy making as a “historically conditioned” process, and they conclude that the disturbing tendencies their research reveals are not due to regional pathology but are part of the more general experience of postmodern democracy.

"The 28 essays reprinted in this volume represent significant recent American writings on archives and the role of archivists in modern society. The essays are arranged into nine parts: Understanding Archives and Manuscripts Archival History Selection and Documentation Appraisal Arrangement and Description Reference and the Use of Archives Preservation Electronic Records Management These articles provide important perspectives both on basic elements of archival practice and on fundamental principles in archival theory and methodology. In addition to these nine parts, there is an introduction and a list of contributors, which provide important context for the readings. "What deserves careful reading . . . is Jimerson's seventeen-page introduction. It is brilliant and worth the price of the entire volume. In it, Jimerson lays the groundwork for a commanding understanding of the thought and development of the profession in the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s." -Megan Sniffin-Marinoff,American Archivist (65:1).