The workshop ‘The Archive and its Practice’ was organised by the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences on 18 October 2023. The main facilitator was Ammel Sharon, Director at the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism (QAMRA) based in the National Law School of India University (NLSIU). She was assisted by Daya Ambirajan, a dynamic contributor to the QAMRA Archival Project.

The workshop began with the facilitator asking students to look through their phone gallery and look for a picture that spoke of the idea of work. Then, a short presentation was made based on the images we sent them. The purpose of the exercise was explained by Ammel Sharon as she connected it with the importance of images in archives and how they are collected, described, and catalogued. Using quotes from well-known scholars such as Antoinette Burton, Prachi Deshpande, Anjali Arondekar and Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita, different perspectives on how to think of the archive were shared. How the principle of taxonomy is applied to the archives was also explained, thereby providing an in-depth understanding of the functioning of archives. Through photographs by Dayanita Singh, the facilitators brought to the workshop the condition of present-day archives and Archivists’ worry about the longevity of materials in archives.

A film on the ‘Lesbian Herstory Archives’, was screened which looked at the collection of archival materials such as different books, t-shirts, pamphlets and content that they had collected and catalogued over the years from different parts of the world. This was a vast contrast to the archives depicted by Dayanita Singh, and showed how different archives can coexist.

The next part of session was taught by Daya Ambirajan, and she proceeded to talk about personal histories, and that our personal histories are just as important to archive. We truly do not know what the future holds, and archiving our histories and our stories are just as important.

Finally, participants were given a few documents and were asked to reconstruct an archive for the same. This exercise gave an opportunity to apply the concepts that we had just learned and gave us a hands-on experience into archiving in general. It was an insightful experience and participants could see how archiving the same piece of material varied from person to person.

Sustainable Development Goals: 4: Quality Education; 5: Gender Equality; 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Outcome of the Event: The event helped students to understand how archives are constructed, what are items that can be collected and catalogued, the concerns with preservation of archives and the process of selection that goes into building archives.