broken-link-checker domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/drcprod/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114bunyad domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/drcprod/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Presenters: Jaime Desantiago (The University of Texas at El Paso), Bibhushana Poudyal (The University of Texas at El Paso), and Veronica Cruz (The University of Texas at El Paso)<\/strong><\/p>\n At the core of this panel was the sense that archives, at their most productive and generative, cannot be approached as and conceived of as static and monolithic repositories. Rather, archival work and archival spaces must be approached as always in process, a constant negotiation between evolving theoretical perspectives and ongoing curatorial practices.<\/p>\n Jaime Desantiago began the panel with his talk “Rethinking Agency: A New Materialist Approach to Hip Hop Archiving.” He used a new materialist lens, based on Laurie Gries\u2019s Still Life with Rhetoric<\/em>, to reconsider the artifacts curated for the Houston Hip Hop Research Collection<\/a> at the University of Houston Libraries. He drew a connection between new materialisms and, what he identified as, the \u201cobjects of hip hop,\u201d including cassettes, sound recordings, written lyrics, business papers, and photographs. According to Desantiago, new materialisms emphasizes the \u201cfluidity\/transformation of meaning as \u2018things\u2019 progress through time\/generations,\u201d much as the recordings in the archive evolve in their meaning making across generations of remixing. He focused on the \u201cchopped and screwed\u201d method of remixing hip hop, originated by DJ Screw in Houston, that severely slows the music, lengthening beats and distorting lyrics. During the Q&A, Desantiago played a clip of this genre, describing the way the slower tempo emphasized certain aspects such as storytelling. Finally, he suggested that we consider sampling as cultural preservation, even as it involves remixing from old to new. Such a claim might align well with Kristin L. Arola and Adam C. Arola in their consideration of ethical assemblages, remix, and sampling in \u201cAn Ethics of Assemblage: Creative Repetition and the Electric Pow Wow\u201d from <\/span>Assembling Composition<\/em> (2017). New materialisms certainly offers a lens for considering the agency of archival artifacts and complicating curatorial and analytical approaches.<\/p>\n Shifting the conversation to methodologies, Bibhushana Poudyal repeated: “Theory and practice! Practice and theory! Praxis!” Her mantra emphasized the inextricability of theory and practice as she worked to complicate Western notions of archives, especially archival representations of non-Western countries and cultures. She began her talk, “Critical Digital Archiving Against the Grain: Precarities, Negotiations, and Possibilities,” with an anecdote about trying to describe Nepal, her home country, to a stranger. She realized that a Google search of Nepal and the archival sources available for the country focused on the 2015 earthquake, tourism, and exoticism. In an effort to complicate this flattened view of Nepal, Poudyal has begun working on two fronts: 1) a practice of generating an archive that counters \u201clinearity in portrayal of non-Western worlds\u201d and 2) a theoretical approach that disrupts Western notions of a \u201cfixed past, museumization, and preservation.\u201d Her methodologies, among others, include critical digital archiving and critical intimacy. She employs both methodologies in her archive Rethinking South Asia via Critical Digital Archiving<\/em><\/a>, now housed on the Omeka platform, which presents an ongoing project for cataloguing everyday photography in Nepal. Her archive provides an alternative to “dominant” representations of Nepal, and in doing so, she offers a perspective of Nepal that counters a flattened, Western narrative. As she explains, \u201cCritical Digital Archiving is under (de)construction and will forever be so\u201d because of its constant negotiation between theory and practice.<\/p>\nJaime Desantiago, “Rethinking Agency: A New Materialist Approach to Hip Hop Archiving”<\/h2>\n
Bibhushana Poudyal, “Critical Digital Archiving Against the Grain: Precarities, Negotiations, and Possibilities”<\/h2>\n
Veronica Cruz, “Cultural Representation: Revitalizing Indigenous Languages”<\/h2>\n