Animal Encounters in the Archive

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable approaches the non-human animals environmental historians encounter within archives every year. While scholars have made extensive effort to explore the unique ways archival sources reveal other-than-human entanglements, participants on this roundtable introduce their own archival animal “encounters” as a means to explore the challenges and potential in these moments and to build on, test, or alter existing scholarly frameworks. Conceiving of the “archive” in broad terms, the instances discussed by this roundtable engage multidisciplinary frameworks and support consideration of the archive as a multispecies environment. We argue that encounters with historical animals are representative of an entangled, archival ecology which is deeply stratified with extractive, colonial histories. This is, in turn, revelatory of the animal as an individual. Supported by intersectional methods and a diverse ecological scope, the archival encounters brought forth by our participants invites conversation via these queries:
• How do scholars encounter animals in the archive, and what can we learn about when and how we encounter them there?
• Whether we seek animal stories in the archive with extractive intention, or encounter them incidentally, what challenges does their presence prompt us to rise to as historians?
• How can considering archives as ecologies of more-than-human entanglement prompt the field to more comprehensively approach existing and novel challenges?
• What does it mean to be thinking about more-than-human histories with visual culture, art, (so-called) specimens, and oral tradition alongside text-based archival sources? How can familiarity with diversified archival environments help us to broaden our considerations of historical animal encounters?
In its considerations of tracks on the trail sought and serendipitous, this roundtable invites pathways to future conversation, problematises novel frameworks, and contributes to the work of working harder to recognise our responsibility to proceed with care when we encounter an animal on varied settler-colonial trails.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Moderator

• Nancy Langston, Michigan Technological University

Presenters

• Caroline Abbott, Independent Scholar

• Isabelle Gapp, University of Aberdeen

• Heather Green, Saint Mary's University

• Javier Gonzalez Cortes, Rutgers University New Brunswick

• Sean Cox, University of New Brunswick