Becoming Otherwise

At the heart of the archive lie the questions of what will be repeated and what comes first, questions that ripple through curriculum studies and qualitative research. Whether social media platforms like Facebook or the monuments of white supremacists, archives increasingly mediate relationships with the past and generate monumental controversies. Hung up on archival exclusions and surplus values—the anarchive—this study considered three different archives: a monument dedicated to Harriet Tubman, a prominent social media platform, and two reading groups dedicated to process philosophy and affect studies. Studying the anarchive involved a mixture of ethnographic methods and speculative practices, like fictocriticism, reading groups, and assemblage art. The way these archives came together affected what they did. Rather than static receptacles, they affected and were affected by novel assemblages. Thus, anarchiving—attunement and experimentation with the archive’s virtuality—entailed taking on responsibility for what those archives might yet become.