Autograph and Parse Journal present a new symposium examining ideas to rethink, reimagine and reshape the histories embedded in archival collections. We will consider how archival materials can be reactivated through diverse perspectives and disciplines, challenging dominant narratives. With a focus on decolonial and queer methodologies, this symposium will invite discussion on approaches that encourage a continual re-engagement with archives.
Encounters: Art, Power and Archives will highlight a broad range of voices, including artistic and scholarly research, creative and social projects, and provocations. Hosted in Autograph's galleries, the symposium will take place surrounded by exhibitions underscoring the critical role of archives.
Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos is the first display of remarkable portraits from 1970s Lagos, possible through the ongoing efforts of the Lagos Studio Archives project, which aims to preserve and present the legacy of Nigerian studio photography. You will also see Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Staging Desire, the culmination of meticulous research into the artist’s archives, presenting never-before-seen works.
As this event takes place in the galleries, limited tickets are available to ensure the best experience for everyone. Autograph's events are popular and we recommend early booking. The ticket price includes lunch.
Encounters: Art, Power and Archive
18 March 2025 | 9:30am - 5:30pm
Autograph, Rivington Place, London. EC2A 3BA
Early bird tickets £25 / full price £40
Full details: https://autograph.org.uk/events/symposium-encounters-art-power-and-archives/?mc_cid=36cc6d0d73&mc_eid=b331f6dd6d
Image: Sasha Huber, Tailoring Freedom - Jack and Drana, daguerreotype, from the series Tailoring Freedom (2021-22), commemorating seven enslaved individuals, adopting art as a means to heal colonial traumas. Co-commissioned by Autograph. See: https://autograph.org.uk/commissions/sasha-huber-tailoring-freedom
Comments
Decolonial and queer methodologies represent critical frameworks that seek to challenge and rethink dominant ways of producing knowledge, particularly those rooted in colonial, Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heteronormative structures.
Decolonial methodologies arise from the recognition that traditional scholarly practices have often reproduced the epistemic violence of colonialism by marginalizing, erasing, or appropriating indigenous and non-Western ways of knowing. Drawing on thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999), decolonial approaches advocate for the recovery, validation, and centering of local, indigenous, and historically silenced epistemologies. They critique the universalizing claims of Western knowledge systems and emphasize relationality, communal ethics, situated knowledge, and the need to dismantle structures that perpetuate colonial hierarchies. In practical terms, decolonial methodologies often involve collaborative research models, privileging oral histories, indigenous languages, non-textual forms of knowledge transmission, and activist scholarship that aims to restore autonomy to colonized or marginalized communities.
Queer methodologies, similarly, interrogate normative assumptions about identity, subjectivity, and power embedded in traditional modes of inquiry. Influenced by scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and José Esteban Muñoz, queer methodologies refuse fixed or binary categorizations, instead embracing fluidity, ambiguity, and non-normativity as central analytic principles. They question how norms of gender, sexuality, and family structure have historically shaped research agendas and interpretive frames. Methodologically, this often entails attentiveness to marginalized narratives, a resistance to teleological or "coming out" narratives of progress, and a commitment to destabilizing categories rather than reinforcing them. Queer approaches frequently employ interdisciplinary techniques, blending ethnography, archival research, creative writing, performance, and autoethnography, to illuminate the lived complexities of queer existence and to resist assimilation into dominant frameworks.
Both decolonial and queer methodologies share a commitment to unsettling entrenched hierarchies of knowledge, revealing the power dynamics underlying academic inquiry, and advocating for forms of research that are more ethically accountable, inclusive, and transformative. They challenge not only what is studied but how knowledge itself is produced, interpreted, and circulated.
Knock, knock! Is anybody there? This was a genuine question. I would like to know what is meant by "decolonial and queer methodologies..."
Excuse my ignorance, but what does this mean? "With a focus on decolonial and queer methodologies..."
I posted this genuine question on February 10th, and I would still like an answer. Many thanks.
Excuse my ignorance, but what does this mean? "With a focus on decolonial and queer methodologies..."