Successful Awards 2020-21
Successful Awards 2020-21
City of Women (London) - Memory Map
Kirsty Fife (UCL Information Studies)
Archive it Ourselves: A Day Symposium Exploring Intersections of DIY Cultures and Archiving/Heritage . This event is a day long symposium exploring the intersections of DIY cultural production (DIY music venues and autonomous spaces; zine making and self-publishing; blogging; podcasting) and archives/information/heritage practices. Recent collaboration between heritage organisations and zine makers and DIY cultures includes the acquisition of significant countercultural collections by libraries and museums (for examples, the Riot Grrrl Collection by Fales Library) collaborations between zine fair organisers and heritage organisations (North West Zine Fest and the People’s History Museum; Weirdo Zine Fest and the National Trust and Science Gallery London), and the establishment of community-led initiatives including the Manchester Digital Music Archive, Salford Zine Library, Queer Zine Archive Project and Birmingham Music Archive. The mobilisation of these networks and communities to capture and collect the heritage of DIY cultures highlights an ongoing need for what Jenna Brager and Jami Sailor refer to as “an intervention by underground cultural producers in the academic project of archiving and “academising” the subcultural practices in which we participate” (Sailor, 2010: p. 1). This also aligns with the aims of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies’ manifesto, which calls for practitioners and researchers to “critically engage with the proposition that heritage studies needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, which requires the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’” (Association of Critical Heritage Studies, 2012: online). This interdisciplinary event will draw together researchers, cultural producers and practitioners to collectively explore the politics, practices and methodologies underpinning these projects. Collectively we will explore the following key questions:
• What methods do DIY cultural producers and organiser utilise to document and record their collective histories?
• How are archives of DIY cultures created, managed, preserved, described and accessed?
• What does a DIY model of archival practice look like?
• How can DIY communities be supported to document and archive their own histories?
• How does social media and digital record creation affect or change record keeping practices in DIY cultures?
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Award £2000
Image: © Kirsty Fife flyer
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