Chronicling Loss: Reimagined Archives in the Wake of a Disaster

What kinds of archives do people create when everything around them is being destroyed? In the face of escalating global crises—ecological collapse, forced displacement to authoritarianism, and colonial erasure--archives have become more than repositories of the past. From earthquake-stricken Turkey to occupied Palestine and post-apartheid South Africa, marginalized communities are reclaiming the archive as a living practice: a means of confronting loss, asserting existence, and imagining alternative futures.

Grounded in anthropology and engaging history, law, digital humanities, and political theory, this project rethinks the archive as an affective, multi-temporal entity—as both method and modality through which scholars and communities contest dominant narratives, co-produce knowledge and respond to the urgency of the present in pursuit of justice. When do certain materials—documents, maps, cities, photographs, films, ruins, monuments, databases, dreams, living beings, objects, and landscapes—gain or lose archival weight, for whom, and why? How does the allure of the archive become a structuring imaginary employed by individuals or groups to redefine their struggles for justice? Engaging these questions, this project investigates how destruction, displacement, and ruination across the Middle East and Mediterranean give rise to new forms of memory-making and documentation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, digital humanities, and archival theory, it interrogates how digital archives rely on place-based memories, embodied knowledge, and community labour for their creation and survival. It also explores how contemporary archival practices animate anthropological theory and methods in multi-temporal and inter-subjective ways, positioning the archive as an analytic of the contemporary in fraught presents.

Fields of research

• Ethnographic Research
• Archival Theory
• Political Anthropology
• History and Memory
• Heritage Studies