Eurocentric Archival Knowledge Production and Decolonizing Archival Theory

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorAbdel-Shehid, Gamal
dc.creatorGordon, Aaron Andrew
dc.date.accessioned2015-08-28T15:05:20Z
dc.date.available2015-08-28T15:05:20Z
dc.date.copyright2014-11-14
dc.date.issued2015-08-28
dc.date.updated2015-08-28T15:05:20Z
dc.degree.disciplineSocial & Political Thought
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation is interested in how archival theory—the theoretical work of archiving produced by archivists and, to a lesser extent, the modes of doing archival research deployed by researchers—tackles the colonial roots and routes of archives, archivists and archival theories and practices. At the base of this examination of archival theory is the assumption that theory produces the object it evaluates. Thus, as opposed to interrogating a pre-existing archive, archival theory produces imaginative and material archival spaces in which archivists and researchers labour. In this dissertation, then, I examine the ways in which Eurocentric intellectual frameworks continue to frame archival theory and, thus, delimit how archivists and researchers produce knowledge about and through archives. In particular, this dissertation is interested in how the Eurocentrism underwriting archival theory as much shapes archivists’ understanding of colonialism and colonial archives by establishing the archive’s and archival theory’s geography, history and future trajectory as covers over the archives’ and archival theory’s colonial history. With an eye to the work of contemporary archivists and theorists who critically interrogate the ways archives and archivists reproduce unequal social relations of power, the following chapters negotiate the tension within these critiques between developing more democratic, socially just and postcolonial archives and archival theory, and the Eurocentric intellectual frameworks that reiterate the divisions between West and non-West, modern societies and traditional communities, literate and oral, and between reason and feeling. The works of Canadian archivists and scholars figure prominently in my dissertation as they both shape my analyses of the effects of Eurocentrism and continuing settler colonial relations on archives, archiving and archival research, and also become objects of analysis through which I trace out the discourses that work to secure and trouble settler title and entitlement to Aboriginal land by erasing or nullifying Indigenous sovereignty in and through Canada’s archives. The aim of my dissertation is to propose modes of archival knowledge production that trouble, if not displace, these Eurocentric and settler frameworks to decolonize archives and archival theory.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/29935
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectInformation science
dc.subjectModern history
dc.subjectCanadian studies
dc.subject.keywordsArchives
dc.subject.keywordsArchival studies
dc.subject.keywordsArchival theory
dc.subject.keywordsEurocentrism
dc.subject.keywordsColonial difference
dc.subject.keywordsColonial knowledge production
dc.subject.keywordsSettler colonialism
dc.subject.keywordsSettler nationalism
dc.subject.keywordsMulticulturalism
dc.subject.keywordsEffective economies
dc.subject.keywordsEtymology
dc.subject.keywordsMemory
dc.subject.keywordsOrality and literacy
dc.subject.keywordsOfficial apologies
dc.subject.keywordsTransnational histories
dc.subject.keywordsCanadian archiving
dc.titleEurocentric Archival Knowledge Production and Decolonizing Archival Theory
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertationen_US

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Gordon_Aaron_A_2014_PhD.pdf
Size:
1.38 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.83 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
YorkU_ETDlicense.txt
Size:
3.38 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download

Collections

Social & Political Thought

All items in the YorkSpace institutional repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved except where explicitly noted.