K.J. Rawson

K.J. Rawson is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. He is also the founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-winning online repository of trans-related historical materials, and he is the co-chair of the editorial board of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary. His work is at the intersections of the Digital Humanities and Rhetoric, LGBTQ+, and Feminist Studies. Focusing on archives as key sites of cultural power, Rawson studies the rhetorical work of queer and transgender archival collections in both brick-and-mortar and digital spaces. He has co-edited special issues of Peitho and TSQ and he co-edited Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Rawson’s scholarship has appeared in Archivaria, Enculturation,Peitho, Present Tense, QED, RSQ, TSQ, and several edited collections.

Title: Confronting (White) Archives
Date: Thursday, April 15, 2:00-3:15 PM EST
Description: In this interactive workshop, we will develop strategies for identifying, navigating, and confronting the pervasive whiteness of the archival enterprise that is, too often, unnamed and unaccounted for. We will begin by thinking through archives as mechanisms of mnemonic power, asking: who has the power to collect historical artifacts? What types of items are collected and whose histories are represented by these items? We will then shift to examining specific digital archival collections and the implicit logics that undergird their collecting scope, organization, and access tools. In the final segment of the workshop, we will consider anti-racist and anti-colonial archival practices that seek to reveal and upend the invisible ideological workings of archives. Participants will be asked to actively contribute to this workshop.

This workshop is limited to 50 participants.