Join us for the joint Etnofoor and NEvA webinar on (Un)making Archives!
Register here!
Rather than treating archives as neutral repositories of the past, this webinar approaches archives as sites where power operates through selection, erasure, classification, and care. The contributions ask how archives shape what becomes visible or stays obscured, whose lives are deemed recordable, and how affect, materiality, and everyday practices enter archival work.
Across different geopolitical and institutional settings, contributors explore how archives are made and unmade through artistic practice, ethnography, and museum research. The cases range from engaging the ethnographer’s archive as a living record, to Dutch cultural institutions that curate whiteness through seemingly benign arrangements, to community-based memory centres in South Africa.
The webinar invites participants to think with archives rather than simply about them. It asks how scholars, artists, activists, and community members work with silence, absence, and excess. It foregrounds methods that attend to what has been erased from the archival record and that treat archival engagement as an ethical and political practice in the present.
This joint event by the Netherlands Association for Anthropology (NEvA) and Etnofoor brings these questions into conversation. We will hear from contributors to Etnofoor’s December issue on Archives, engage with Rune Sasse from The Utrecht Archives, and welcome Kristine Krause as discussant.
Speakers:
- Rune Sassen studied anthropology (Bsc) and cultural history (MA) at Utrecht University. She works at The Utrecht Archives (Het Utrechts Archief), the provincial and municipal archive of Utrecht.
- Karolien Nédée (Antwerp 1990) is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law of UCLouvain-Saint-Louis in Brussels, where she researches the possibilities and limitations of the legal framework surrounding colonial collections in Belgium. Between 2022 and 2025, she worked as provenance researcher at Wereldmuseum Rotterdam on collections from Central and South Asia, Central Africa and South America. Previously she taught at secondary schools in Brussels for several years. Karolien is interested in the inheritance of colonialism, through the angles of material culture, law, and education.
- Daantje van de Linde is a cultural historian based in the Netherlands. Since 2023, she works as a provenance researcher at Wereldmuseum Rotterdam where she studies its Africa collection. She obtained MA degrees in African Studies at Leiden University and Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam between 2021-2024. She previously conducted research in Namibia into the importance of restitution of cultural heritage from German museums.
- Nina Andro is a early-career historian currently working as a Teaching Fellow at Maastricht University. Her MA research, for which she received a full Erasmus Mundus scholarship and graduated Cum Laude, has been rewritten for this issue of Etnofoor. It examines how informal community spaces in Stellenbosch, South Africa, serve as sites of historical preservation and identity construction for the town’s coloured communities, whose histories remain largely absent from official archives and public memory. Nina’s research interests include memory studies, colonial history, spatial justice, histories of (racial) inequality, multimodal research, and Southern Africa. She is currently applying for PhD positions.
- Nicholas Lackenby is a social anthropologist and currently Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His research explores the interconnections between historical consciousness, kinship, and ethical life. He has conducted research in Serbia, Bosnia and – more recently – the US South.
- Kristine Krause is Professor of Anthropology, Health and Care at the University of Amsterdam and directs the Research Group Health Care and the Body within the Anthropology Department, dedicated to making academia a friendlier place. She views care and bodily vulnerabilities as entry points for studying broader societal and political issues, such as how relationships with others, the state, the objects we use and live with, and the spaces we inhabit are altered when we need care. Her interest in the notion of “archive” has been stimulated by her ERC-funded projectReloCare, in which she and her team investigate care outsourcing to Central and Eastern Europe. This project explores the multi-layered histories of inequality and domination in the region, and how they are related to, and enacted in, institutional care and transnational care arrangements.