In recent years, researchers and activists have turned to digital tools and platforms for the archiving, mapping, and sharing of oral histories, interviews, GIS data, and other information that document acts of violence, dispossession, and resilience. This turn to the new archives reflects a pervasive sense that, in the diasporic settings that have taken shape since 2011, memory – in its plural forms – is a vital site to negotiate political agency. This agency touches the individuals who share their memories and experiences in emergent archives, as well as the researchers and activists who collect, organize, and debate the “data” that comes into their possession. Yet it also touches the imagined audiences of digital archives. Set loose from the state oversight that founded the classical notion of archives, today’s initiatives struggle with significant logistical challenges, from funding cycles to the struggle for long-term institutional homes. Yet they are also freed to imagine their future readers and viewers, researchers, and participants. In their emergent shapes and scopes, digital archives offer largely under-theorized opportunities for new, nonextractive pathways of knowledge sharing with communities – both in the MENA and in diaspora.

This workshop invites researchers and practitioners to share and reflect on their experiences in digital archive-building and mapping. Among our key questions will be the following:

• What forms of knowledge do digital tools (for archiving and dissemination) make possible, and how do they relate to the traditional ways that knowledge in our respective areas of specialization has been made, hierarchized, and shared (or not)?
• How can practitioners address logistics of access and longevity in non-state archives? What precarities do diasporic archives face vis-a-vis their "host" (e.g., European) states and institutions?
• Who (and/or where) are the publics of diasporic archives?
• What spaces and practices (if any) currently exist for creative storytelling in contemporary archiving practices?
• How do researchers, practitioners, and activists grapple with extractivism, research ethics, and the risks of knowledge-sharing in their work?
• What choices are made in the curation and modelling of archival information, and how do these choices eventually shape narratives of the recent past? Should curators and custodians of new archives lay their explicit narratives on top of these repositories of interconnected artefacts? How might these decisions affect the perception and reception of digital archives?

Participants: Clara Abai (SYRASP / FTS), Diana Abbani (MECAM / FTS), Fadi Adleh (Lab), Mohammad Al Attar (Berlin), Yvonne Albers (EUME / FU Berlin), Hadi al-Khatib (Mnemonic), Taha al-Mohammad (Lab), Majd al-Shihabi (U of Toronto), Marianna al-Tabaa (Lab), Jaber Baker (Lab), Enrico De Angelis (UntoldStories / UntoldMag), Nermin Elsherif (Utrecht U), Veronica Ferreri (KWI Essen / Ca'Foscari U), Ahmad Gharbeia (MECAM / FTS), Nisrin Habib (Women Now for Development), Sune Haugbolle (Roskilde U), Dagmar Hovestädt (ISIS Prisons Museum), Mina Ibrahim (U Marburg / Shubra Archive), Yasmine Kherfi (LSE), Zoya Masoud (BEYONDREST / FTS), Amer Matar (ISIS Prisons Museum), Anne-Marie McManus (SYRASP / FTS ), Ahmad Mekkawi (Spirula), Alia Mossallam (EUME / Helmholtz Zentrum für Kulturtechnik), Stella Peisch (UMAM), Annsar Shahhoud (Lab / Trinity College), Michael Willenbücher (HU Berlin), and Hanane Yazigi (Lab).

This workshop is organised by the ERC-funded research project “The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria: Voices, Texts, Publics” (SYRASP) (grant agreement no. 851393) in cooperation with the Lab for the Study of Violence, UMAM Documentation & Research, and the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM). 

It is conducted in a hybrid format at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and online. Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de.