Geographies of Counter Archiving

About the event

This is a closing event for the project Archiving Resistance. The project curated artefacts from two contemporary protests in India namely, the movement against Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, 2019 (across India) and Farmers Protests near Singhu border in Delhi against the Indian Agriculture Acts of 2020. It builds on oral historical accounts of the protesters and creates an autonomous archive of various forms of artefacts (posters, banners, badges, poetry and performances). In the closing event we showcase our project outputs while being in conversation with colleagues from other counter-archiving projects from across South Asia and beyond.

About the speakers

Manu Luksch

Manu Luksch makes films and artworks that investigate the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space, and political structures. She exhibits internationally and her works are included in the Collection de Centre Georges Pompidou, the BFI National Archive, amongst other. She was Visiting Artist at Birkbeck’s School of Law and Roberta Bowman Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University 2021, and is currently Senior Research Associate at AiDesign Lab, Royal College of Arts.

Mukul Patel

Mukul Patel is an artist and researcher who develops intermedia works, environments and platforms, alongside composing for contemporary dance, film and the built environment. The creation of open and sustainable processes and tools, and the recentring of technological structures around community, are prominent aspects of his practice. He has been developing an open audio archive with the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna since 2021, and is currently a Senior Research Associate at AiDesign Lab, Royal College of Art.

Mahvish Ahmad

Mahvish Ahmad is an educator, scholar and organiser. She is an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics. Mahvish studies state violence and the intellectual and political labour of movements targeted in repression. Movements produce analyses, critiques, and alternatives to violent states, for example in underground pamphlets. Through this work, she investigates non-canonical movement thought to expand what constitutes social theory. As part of this work, Mahvish is a co-founder of Revolutionary Papers and a UK-based Trustee of the South Asian Research and Resource Centre (SARRC), an Islamabad-based archive of Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements.

Hana Morgenstern

Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle East Literature at Cambridge University. She is a co-founder, PI and co-director of Revolutionary Papers. Dr Morgenstern is a writer, translator and scholar of Middle Eastern literatures and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialization in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. Her current research examines how colonialism and decolonization have shaped literary forms and cultural practices. This includes the formation of anticolonial literatures, cultural journals, organizations and forums, and the role these have played within histories and ongoing processes of decolonization. Her upcoming book Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature, Translation and Magazines (EUP 2024), reconstructs a history of anticolonial Palestinian and Jewish literary collaborations, from the heyday of decolonization in the 1950s to the present day. Recent publications include essays in Journal of Levantine Studies, Modernism/modernity and an upcoming special issue on Revolutionary Papers for Radical History Review.

Senel Wanniarachchi

Senel Wanniarachchi is a final year PhD Researcher at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. His research is interested in understanding how discourses on ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ are instrumentalised in frameworks that are anti-imperialist, but also nationalist, patriarchal, heteronormative and anti-human rights in the postcolony. His research has appeared in the Cultural Politics Journal and is set to appear in the upcoming Handbook on Contemporary Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, Senel co-founded an activist organisation called Hashtag Generation which works in the intersections of human rights and social media.

Chair

Raktim Ray

Raktim Ray is a Lecturer (Teaching) at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU). He is the joint Programme Leader for the MSc programme in Development Administration and Planning. Raktim’s research focuses on two thematic areas a) solidarity networks and politics of care and b) ethnography of the state. Raktim critiques the binary framework of resistance and dominance to understand state-political society relations and argue the framework of conflict politics is able to capture some of the nuances of developmental politics in the postcolonial context. His current research projects focus on spatial occupation of urban protests, archiving sensory heritage and politics of care. Geographically, Raktim’s research projects are across various cities in India and London, UK.

Srilata Sircar

Srilata Sircar is a geographer based at the King’s India Institute, King’s College London. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Geoforum and Gender, Place and Culture; as well as in popular portals such as The Conversation and Feminism in India. Through her research she seeks to explore the relationship between caste, race, and capital in the context of urban transformations, agrarian change, and labour relations. She is the host of the Confronting Caste podcast and has an interest in documentary filmmaking and other arts-based practices.