DAN THOTTAKKARA NATIONAL SEMINAR

ARCHIVES OF THE EVERYDAY

Memory, Representation, Material Culture and Visual Histories of Marginalised Communities.

January 28^th and 29^th, 2027

About the Seminar

The Dan Thottakkara National Seminar was launched by the Department of English and Centre for Research, Sacred Heart College (Autonomous), Thevara, in the year 2000 to revitalize the memory of the late scholar, Rev. Dr. Dan Thottakkara. Since its inception, the seminar has focused on frontier areas in literary studies and critical theories and has attracted scholars from all over India. This year’s seminar, Archives of The Everyday: Memory, Representation, Material Culture And Visual Histories of Marginalised Communities titled is conceived to address the forgotten archives of our lives.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS PAPERS
& INVITED LECTURE

SEMINAR CONCEPT NOTE

ARCHIVES OF THE EVERYDAY : Memory, Representation, Material Culture and Visual Histories of Marginalised Communities.

Archives are not just repositories of the past. They are selected, classified, kept, and forgotten, and in this way, they shape whose lives count as evidence and whose lives pass without record. Trouillot (1995) shows that silence enters history at four points: when sources are created, when archives are built, when sources are retrieved as narrative, and when significance is finally assigned. Stoler (2009) reads colonial archives as places of anxiety and uncertainty as much as of authority. This raises a hard question: how can we engage the lives of those recorded only through violence, such as the enslaved, the poor, and the dispossessed, without repeating that violence
(Hartman, 2008)?

These questions are most pressing in the everyday. Ordinary life leaves fragile traces: a ledger entry, a photograph, a recipe, a work song, a ritual gesture, a graffito, a voice note. Everyday practice is also a way of inhabiting systems, and it carries memory in forms that documents do not. The archive of written records and the repertoire of embodied practice, which persists through performance and transmission, hold different kinds of knowledge. Affect, trauma, and inherited memory also live in ephemera and images.

The conference asks how everyday experience survives in texts, images, objects, oral traditions, and embodied practice. It asks how that experience disappears, through erasure, neglect, censorship, disaster, and obsolescence, and how it acquires meaning through representation, curation, and cultural memory. Finally, it asks how it can be recovered through critical, collaborative, and community-led methods that are ethical and attentive to who holds authority over the record.

Memory, representation, and the politics of ordinary life run through all of this. Memory concerns what is kept and passed on. Representation concerns who depicts ordinary lives and who contests those depictions. Politics concerns who holds power over the record, whose everyday counts as worth keeping, and whose is left out.

CENTRAL QUESTIONS

How do archival structures produce silence, and how can silence be read as evidence?
Which non-textual archives (oral, material, visual, performed) carry the memory of
everyday life?
Who represents ordinary lives, and how do communities challenge those representations?
What are the ethics of recovery: consent, ownership, care, and the risk of re-exposing harm?
How does digital media shape the survival and disappearance of everyday records?
How do marginalised communities represent, read, and retell the story of their own survival?

OBJECTIVES

To build a comparative, interdisciplinary approach connecting literary studies, history, anthropology, visual and material culture, performance studies, archival science, and the digital humanities.
To theorise archival silence and erasure in relation to caste, class, gender, race, colonialism, migration, and disability.
To develop ethical, participatory and context-sensitive methods for the recovery of marginalised lives.
To bring scholars together with archivists, curators, artists, writers, and community custodians.
To produce publications and open resources that advance archival and memory studies.

POTENTIAL TOPIC AREAS INCLUDE (BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO) THE FOLLOWING:

Archive, Silence, and Erasure: archival power, the colonial record, silences and absences, reading against and along the grain.
Textual and Literary Archives: novels, poetry, life-writing, diaries, letters, marginalia, print ephemera; fiction as archive and counter-archive.
Visual and Material Archives: photography, family albums, cinema, posters, comics, paintings, things, places, tools, textiles, food, and the social life of things.
Oral, Sonic, and Performative Archives: oral history, song, testimony storytelling, language loss; ritual, theatre, dance, gesture, and repertoire.
Representation and Marginalised Lives: caste, race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, labour, migration, disability; community archives and liberatory memory work.
Digital, Environmental, and Future Archives: born-digital records, social media, algorithmic bias, data sovereignty, climate and disaster loss, preservation and obsolescence.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

We welcome original, unpublished papers, panel proposals, archive-lab proposals, and creative or practice-based papers on the above. Literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, visual culture, museum and archival studies, performance studies, and the digital humanities are all welcome, as are comparative and South Asian perspectives. Participants are requested to send the abstracts based on their original and unpublished research articles related to the above-mentioned topics. The names, affiliations, mobile number, email address, and full mailing address of all authors must be mentioned. The abstracts are to be sent conforming to the latest MLA style of documentation. Send your abstracts to danseminar@shcollege.ac.in. Abstracts will be selected after a review by the select committee. Selected papers will be invited for an edited volume and a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal. A limited number of registration waivers is available for research scholars and community participants.

GUIDELINES FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Abstracts should be submitted as an email attachment with “Archival Afterlives” typed in the subject field.
The attachment should include a 300-word abstract, name(s) of the author(s), affiliation(s), and complete and final email ID(s).
Use Microsoft Word, Times New Roman, 12 pt.
Title: Less than 15 words, with the first letter of each word in uppercase (capital) and formatted in 12 pt bold.
The abstract should be a continuous expository narrative, not a list of points or a PowerPoint presentation.
Avoid using advanced word-processing features such as lines separating footnotes and titles, background or font colours, highlighting, and embossing.
The draft should be thoroughly checked and proofread before submission.
Revised versions or resubmissions will not be accepted. Each presenter will be given 15–20 minutes for the presentation, followed by 3–5 minutes for discussion. All conference halls are equipped with PPT facilities.

INVITED LECTURE

Share Your Expertise. Inspire the World.

Are you an expert, researcher, academician, or practitioner with a passion to lecture?

We invite you to deliver an Invited Lecture on a theme listed at our National Conference.

Registration Fee: ₹2,500 only

Certificate of Invited Lecture will be provided

Limited Slots

Interested participants may apply separately via email or contact the coordinators directly. This is not included in the Regular Registration Form.

Email: danseminar@shcollege.ac.in

Contact: Fr. Joseph Varghese – 9605047545