I am pleased to announce that Al Cunningham Rogers has been awarded the 2023 Dodds Prize for their paper "Theoretical Approaches to the Appraisal of Graffiti Ephemera: A Toronto Case Study.”

Al will graduate from the University of Toronto this spring, and their paper was submitted by Fiorella Foscarini. During their time at UofT, Al has been working with Dr. Shana Almeida at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) as a research assistant on a SSHRC funded project considering race, racism, and governance strategies in Toronto. They have recently accepted a position at Scholar’s Portal to assist with digital preservation.

Instituted in 2011, the Dodds Prize recognizes superior research and writing on an archival topic by a student enrolled in a Master's level archival studies program at a Canadian university. The award honours Gordon Dodds (1941–2010), first President of the ACA, and Archivaria's longest-serving general editor. Submissions received for the 2022-23 academic year were reviewed by adjudication committee members Amy Marshall Furness, Brett Lougheed, Alexandra Mills, and Heather Home. I thank the committee for their service.

Al’s paper will be published in the Spring 2024 issue of Archivaria. The citation reads:

Written in a concise, energetic, and persuasive tone, Al Cunningham Rogers’ paper Theoretical Approaches to the Appraisal of Graffiti Ephemera: A Toronto Case Study does an excellent job of establishing a conceptual model for understanding the function(s) of graffiti—an inherently ephemeral, evolving, and transitory record. Borrowing from scholarship on the affective impacts of archives in the creation of an archives of feelings, particularly feminist theory and Althusser’s subject interpolation theory of call and response, Rogers skilfully makes use of close reading for a number of examples of anonymous, marginal graffiti to provide a framework for the appraisal and selection of exemplars of graffiti for an archive of everyday life.

Congratulations, Al, on your excellent work.

Rebecka Taves Sheffield

Managing Editor

Archivaria