Webinar “In Conversation over Archives” – 23 January 2026

Rather than treating archives as neutral repositories of the past, this webinar approaches archives as sites where power operates through selection, erasure, classification, and care. The contributions ask how archives shape what becomes visible or stays obscured, whose lives are deemed recordable, and how affect, materiality, and everyday practices enter archival work.

Across different geopolitical and institutional settings, contributors explore how archives are made and unmade through artistic practice, ethnography, and museum research. The cases range from engaging the ethnographer’s archive as a living record, to Dutch cultural institutions that curate whiteness through seemingly benign arrangements, to community-based memory centres in South Africa.

The webinar invites participants to think with archives rather than simply about them. It asks how scholars, artists, activists, and community members work with silence, absence, and excess. It foregrounds methods that attend to what has been erased from the archival record and that treat archival engagement as an ethical and political practice in the present.

This joint event by the Netherlands Association for Anthropology (NEvA) and Etnofoor brings these questions into conversation. We will hear from contributors to Etnofoor’s December issue on Archives, engage with Rune Sasse from The Utrecht Archives, and welcome Kristine Krause as discussant.

More details and registration here.