Archival Play

Abstract

AbstractThis article offers a critical and personal reflection on the role of curiosity, fragments, and play in creating meaningful encounters with archives in the college classroom. Drawing on play theory, poetics, media studies, and pedagogical theory, the essay reimagines archival collections as formal and material playgrounds open to spontaneous experimentation. Through reflections on the finding aid, logistical media, Curious George, and other subjects, the essay finds in the archive an elemental play that can be harnessed to create a radically spontaneous pedagogy organized around student curiosity. By cultivating the curiosity inherent to archival play, teachers can actively shape the playful dividend that arrives when students enter the archive and begin to search, find, and discover meaningful patterns in the fragments of history.

Journal
Pedagogy
Published
2021-10-01
DOI
10.1215/15314200-9131845
Open Access
Closed
Topics

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

Cites in this index (5)

  1. College English
  2. College Composition and Communication
  3. College English
  4. College Composition and Communication
  5. Pedagogy
Also cites 11 works outside this index ↓
  1. Blanks: Data, Method, and the British American Print Shop
    American Literary History  
  2. Archives and the Spirit of American Literary History
    American Literary History  
  3. In the Author's Hand: Artifacts of Origin and Twentieth-Century Reading Practice
    RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage  
  4. Digital Memory and the Archive
  5. Looking for Whitman: A Multi-Campus Experiment in Digital Pedagogy
  6. The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or, What You Do with a Million Books
  7. Googling the Archive: Digital Tools and the Practice of History
    Advances in the History of Rhetoric  
  8. Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific …
  9. The Evolution of the Finding Aid in the United States: From Physical to Digital Document Genre
    Archival Science  
  10. Putting Students ‘In Whitman's Hand.’
  11. Archival Representation
    Archival Science  
CrossRef global citation count: 0 View in citation network →