Community Archiving as imagining the world 'otherwise'? Spaces and practices of unofficial knowledge production in the UK

本研究将探讨当代英国社区档案的社会文化作用。社区或其他非官方档案是存在于“官方”存储库之外的替代记录的重要来源。对于英国社会中少数族裔、LGBTQ+和其他未被充分代表的群体来说尤其如此，但对于工人阶级历史和其他形式的知识来说也是如此。这些档案已成为各种学术学科的研究主题——人们越来越认识到档案不是中立空间，其主观和政治构成意味着社区档案尤其经常被视为一种积极实践形式，或作为一种创造挑战既定规范的反叛或修复历史的方式（Hall, 2001, Flinn, 2011, Prescod, 2017）。然而，正如Caswell等人（2017）所认为的那样，虽然档案可能为边缘化群体提供了“想象其他方面”的空间，并反驳了他们被歪曲或模糊的主流叙事，但这并不是一个简单的过程。

This research will examine the socio-cultural role of community archives in the contemporary UK. Community or other non-official archives are important sources of alternative records that exist outside 'official' repositories. This is especially the case for members of BAME, LGBTQ+ and other under-represented groups in UK society, but is also true of working class histories and other forms of knowledge. These archives have become a subject of study for a variety of academic disciplines - it is increasingly recognised that archives are not neutral spaces, and their subjective and political constitution means that community archives in particular are often read as a form of activist praxis or as a way of creating insurgent or reparative histories which challenge established norms (Hall, 2001, Flinn, 2011, Prescod, 2017). However, as Caswell et al. (2017) argue whilst archives potentially provide spaces for marginalised groups to 'imagine otherwise' and counter mainstream narratives in which they are misrepresented or obscured, this is not a straightforward process.