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Abstract
This paper explores the notion of archiving as radical activist activity, focusing on why and how archival collections are created, used and animated by communities embedded in housing struggles and political movements. This article is based on interviews with activist groups in Elephant and Castle, South London, campaigning against a local urban regeneration scheme. The focus here is on contemporary history-making, and how archival material can be used to construct a useful past for the purposes of campaigning and activism. The paper will assess how archiving is used as a campaigning tool within housing struggles, and how the archive space is transformed into a site of resistance and contestation in this context. The paper will explore how archives are activated and used in the ‘here and now’ to mobilize, engage and provoke response. The paper emphasizes the idea of archives as a place and the activist as curator, considering what alternative uses of the archive offer to an activist community. Additionally, it explores how activists curate and collect archival information, examining the use of Freedom of Information as a collecting strategy, and how data curation and visualizations allow new interpretations of archival material to be imagined.
Notes
1. Interview, Southwark Notes.
2. Flinn and Alexander, “Humanizing an Inevitably Political Craft.”
3. For case study and ethnographic approaches to community activist archives/archival activism, refer to: Flinn, “Archival Activism”; Wakimoto, Bruce, and Partridge, “Archivist as Activist”; and Hopkins, “Places From Which to Speak.”
4. Pell, “Radicalizing the Politics.”
5. Campkin, Remaking London, 8.
6. See note 4 above.
7. Heygate was Home online archive.
8. BBC News, “Heygate Estate Residents Fight.”
9. Heygate and Aylesbury Leaseholders Action Group quoted on Southwark Notes.
10. 56a infoshop, http://www.56a.org.uk/.
11. 56a infoshop facebook page, http://www.56a.org.uk/.
13. Elephant Amenity Network Archive.
14. Elephant Amenity Network, “Some History.”
15. Campkin, Remaking London, 5.
16. Campkin, Remaking London.
17. Lees, Slater, and Wyly, Gentrification, xv.
18. Lend Lease, “Elephant and Castle.”
19. Heygate was Home, “Regeneration Timeline.”
20. Elephant Amenity Network, “Elephant Amenity Charter.”
21. Stevens, Flinn, and Shepherd, “New Frameworks for Community Engagement,” 59.
22. Ibid., 60.
23. Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives,” 153.
24. Stevens, Flinn, and Shepherd, “New Frameworks for Community Engagement,” 60.
25. See note 23 above.
26. Harris, “The Archival Sliver,” 65.
27. Waterton and Smith, “The Recognition and Misrecognition,” 9.
28. Bastian and Alexander, Community Archives, 5.
29. Zinn, “Secrecy, Archives,” 20.
30. Harris, Archives and Justice, 63.
31. Hall, “Constituting an Archive,” 92, 186.
32. Moore and Pell, “Autonomous Archives,” 255.
33. Derrida, Archive Fever, 4.
34. Pell, “Radicalising the Politics,” 36.
35. Interview, Southwark Notes.
36. Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 2.
37. Interview, Heygate was Home.
38. Heygate was Home, “Press Archive.”
39. Heygate was Home.
40. Interview, Southwark Notes.
41. Flinn, “Archival Activism,” 10.
42. Interview, Heygate was Home.
43. Better Elephant, http://betterelephant.org/images/HeygateCrimeStats.pdf.
44. Interview, Heygate was Home.
45. Better Elephant, “Heygate FOI Appeal Decision.”
46. The Guardian, “Revealed: How Developers Exploit.”
47. Interview, Heygate was Home.
48. Gilliland and Flinn, “Community Archives.”
49. Interview, Heygate was Home.
50. Interview, Southwark Notes.
51. Campkin, Remaking London, 8.
52. Hall, “Constituting an Archive.”
53. Interview, Southwark Notes.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Interview, Elephant Amenity Network.
57. Interview, Southwark Notes.
58. Interview, Elephant Amenity Network.
59. Gilliland and Flinn, “Community Archives,” 8.
60. Interview, Elephant Amenity Network.
61. Staying Put: An Anti-gentrification Handbook.
62. Ibid.
63. See note 59 above.
64. Pell, “Radicalizing the Politics,” 38.
65. Hopkins, “Places From Which to Speak,” 96.
66. Flinn, “Archival Activism,” 15.
67. Bastian, “Taking Custody, Giving Access.”
68. “What’s this Place? Stories from Radical Social Centres.”
69. Ibid.
70. Interview, Southwark Notes.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. 56a.org.uk/archive.
76. Interview, Southwark Notes.
77. Ibid.
78. Pell, “Radicalising the Politics,” 54.
79. 56a Archive.
80. Hall, “Constituting an Archive,” 92.
81. Pell, “Radicalizing the Politics,” 45.
82. Hall, “Constituting an Archive,” 89.
83. Duranti, “Archives as a Place.”
84. Ibid., 244.
85. Ibid.
86. Bastian, “Taking Custody, Giving Access,” 76.