Archiving from Below Discussion Series: Archive Stories with Sara Salem and Mai Taha
November 27 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm GMT
Archive Stories looks at how we can work with creative and non-traditional archives. The project wants to create a space for conversations about archiving beyond institutional archives, and to think through the possibilities that emerge when we imagine the archive as expansive and as encompassing everything around us.
What does it mean to work with creative archives like music, food, or film? How does someone begin working with archives like these? How might we come across unexpected archives when we expand what ‘archive’ means? Approaching archiving as a practice, rather than a finished product opens up space to think about the many ways in which history is remembered and recorded.
More about Archive Stories here: https://archive-stories.com/
Sara Salem
Sara Salem is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, and global histories of anticolonialism. Her recently published book with Cambridge University Press is entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020). A selection of published journal articles include: on Angela Davis in Egypt in the journal Signs; on Frantz Fanon and Egypt’s postcolonial state in Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies; onGramsci and anticolonialism in the postcolony inTheory, Culture and Society; and on Nasserism in Egypt through the lens of haunting in Middle East Critique. She is currently thinking and writing about ghosts and anticolonial archives.
Mai Taha
Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has written on law, colonialism, labour movements, class and gender relations, and social reproduction in the Middle East. A selection of her publications include: Human Rights and Communist Internationalism: On Inji Aflatoun and the Surrealists (2023); The Comic and the Absurd: On Colonial Law in Revolutionary Palestine (2022); and Law, Class Struggle and Nervous Breakdowns (2021). Using film, literature, and oral history narratives, Mai is currently working on questions relating to labour, the home, and revolutionary subjectivity.