Uppsala University, Sweden, 27-28 May 2025

Organized by Patrick Anthony (Uppsala University), Cristian M. Torres Gutiérrez (University of Oslo), and Hirra Ateeq (Newham Archives, London)

The conference ‘ReOrient: Active archives and (counter)colonial space’ opens dialogue between researchers and archivists to promote positive action and pluralist memory politics. The event gathers researchers and practitioners around decolonial themes: at heart, it is a reflexive exercise in methods of analysis and archiving that might disrupt colonialist thinking about human difference, particularly the Orientalist conceit of absolute distance between Western modernity and subaltern groups who resist its brittle hegemony. ReOrient contests that distance and takes the archive as an actor—or perhaps an activist—in contemporary struggles for liberation and Indigenous heritage. The conference features a keynote lecture by Dr. Shourideh Molavi (Columbia University), the lead Palestine researcher for Forensic Architecture. Please see the extended conference abstract Pdf, 494 kB..

The conference’s four sessions are organized around the following themes:

1. How to hear hidden voices

On using decolonial archival practice to unsettle power structures and highlight hidden voices

2. Archives of indigenous autonomy

On archives in relation to indigenous resistance and the right to self-determination

3. Reading landscapes as archives

On landscape, its representation, and more-than-human inhabitants as ‘archival’ sources

4. Archival cartographies

On pluralising records of spatial imagination, territory, and map-making by working across epistemological traditions

Call for papers

We welcome 20-minute papers across a range of historical geographical, literary, decolonial/postcolonial, anthropological, archival, and curatorial fields. Please submit an abstract of ca. 250 words to patrick.anthony@idehist.uu.se by Friday 13 December. The Conference will be happy to cover travel and accommodation expenses for all participants with support from the European Union and Uppsala University.