ACA 2021 Virtual Conference - June 7-11, 2021

The ACA 2021 Annual conference is approaching fast! In the Field: The ACA blog is featuring the profile of a few members who will be presenting at the conference, June 7-11, 2021. Today we are featuring the profile of Annaëlle Winand, PhD candidate at the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information de l’Université de Montréal.

[Black and white portrait of Annaëlle Winand in front of a "Creature from the Black Lagoon" poster]

Title of your presentation to the ACA 2021 conference?

What’s in Between? Archive(s) and the Unarchived and Unarchivable Space of Found Footage Cinema

Can you walk us through your academic and professional path? 

Back in Belgium, where I am from, I studied history. After I graduated, I taught for a very short time in secondary school before deciding to go back to university to specialize in archival science. I was then hired by the Archives of the University of Louvain-la-Neuve where I worked as an archivist for a little more than two years.

What brought you to the field of archival studies and practice?

I always tell the same (true!) story: at some point in my life, I declared that I wanted to work with “dead things”… How wrong was I? More seriously, while studying history, I was always working in and with archives. When I decided to re-orient my career it felt quite natural to study the very material I have been involved with for so long. The Archives were also a place I liked, and I was curious about what felt like “behind the scenes” of such institutions.

What do the theme of the ACA 2021 conference, “Home Improvement: Building Archives Through Change,” means to you in terms of overall archival orientations and practice?

The theme clearly resonates with archivists trying to be more introspective, asking what we should do about the power dynamics that exists at the core of our work. But it also asks the question: what is home? What archives have we been building so far? Does it need improvement, renovation or, more radically, foundational work? I am truly looking forward to discussing these important questions during the conferences.

Can you tell us about your research approach and perspectives?

My work emerges from the “exploitation” framework studied by Yvon Lemay and Anne Klein, which places the uses of archives as an integral part of their trajectory. What especially interests me is the non-traditional uses of archives (or material that is called archives) and how they reveal blind spots in archival science. My dissertation, for example, explores the notions of the unarchived and the unarchivable through absence, invisible, forbidden, and unthinkable.