`History of the Present’: Living History, Ethics and the Role of Archives in Documenting Under-Represented Communities Panel at ARA Conference 2016.

ARA_programme_v535The 2016 Archives and Records Association Annual Conference 2016 is scheduled to take place at the Hilton London Wembley , London, from Wednesday 31st August until Friday 2nd September 2016. The focus of this year’s conference will be on “Global Futures.”

The ARA highlights that the role of Archives is at the heart of this global movement, as:

The record, its information content and memory are an increasing global commodity and as professional custodians we are responsible for authenticity and integrity; which in turn ensures that global research, knowledge exchange, collective memory, political and legal rights, are able to be explored, scrutinized and upheld.
(ARA Conference Website – www.archives.org.uk/ara-in-action/the-ara-conference.html)

With only a week or so to go until the ARA Conference, Iwanted to take this opportunity to highlight our panel of papers entitled “Inclusivity meets `History of the Present’: Living History, Ethics and the Role of Archives in Documenting Under-Represented Communities.”  In addition to a paper which will use to briefly showcase the Living Refugee Archive and our civic engagement work with the Refugee Council Archive, our panel consists of a number of interestung papers including:

Evan Easton-Calabria. Title: Stepping Back: Archival research on refugees as a heuristic for refugee assistance today

Anne Irfan. Title: Over-researched, Under-represented: The Case of the Palestinian Refugee Camps

Liz Tilley. Title: ‘Co-producing a living archive of learning disability history’: exploring ethics, consent and inclusion.’

Paul V. Dudman. Title: Archives, Ethics and Civic Engagement: Refugee Voices, Participatory Performance and Oral History – the Role of Civic Engagement in Enhancing Archives?

I hope this will be a great session and thank you so much to Anne, Evan and Liz for agreeing to participate on this panel.  Full details of the conference can be found on the ARA website along with details of the Conference Programme and the Conference Handbook.