The ARC aims to encompass all forms of archive research and is not restricted by discipline. The aim is to foster a truly interdisciplinary community to emphasise and realise the multidisciplinary potential of archival research.
Archival research is core to the research of many academics and researchers at SHU. At the same time, the SHU Special Collections holds a growing number of media, cultural, and political archive collections, both paper based and audio-visual. The Archive Research Community (ARC) is a proposed forum to bring together researchers from across SHU, and the wider region, to discuss, share, and collaborate, and to consider ways in which SHU’s Special Collections can be used and how a wider network of archival research collaboration in the region can be developed.
The ARC forum will be a space for discussion and debate, a space to share ongoing research, a space to initiate new collaborations, and a space to discuss strategic approaches to building research capacity and income for archival research at SHU. It is the aim to create a co-ordinated, long-term sustainable community of researchers and archivists. The forum will also be a space to invite external guests (researchers, archivists, funders) to discuss archival research. And the forum will consider how archival research, and SHU’s Special Collections, can be embedded in our teaching. Separate to the forums, it is proposed that members of the ARC will stage public talks to promote their research, with the talks serving as a means of public engagement and impact.
The ARC objectives are as follows:
- To establish a network of researchers to share and discuss archival research, methods, and proposals through interdisciplinary collaborations, partnerships, and forums.
- To consolidate and grow the research and teaching use of existing archival collections in SHU’s Special Collections and the wider region.
- To collaborate on projects, research grants, and outputs.
- To stage a conference / symposium in spring / summer 2023.
- To collaborate on an edited collection of essays based on the conference / symposium.