In his conversation with science historian Lorraine Daston,1.2.1 artist Andrew Yang asserts that contemporary discussions about the Anthropocene “destabilize traditional notions of history and the sense it makes of human agency.” This pathway explores what these destabilizations entail for practices of archiving in the Anthropocene. As both thinkers suggest, the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the digital revolution have caused a veritable avalanche of archival material that requires rethinking the retrieval techniques, classificatory schema, and interpretive frameworks that structure how we preserve and engage with various kinds of historical data. This stimulating conversation shaped our selection of materials for the pathway, which includes a variety of problematizations of history and the archive in the Anthropocene. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Kim Fortun and her colleagues on community archiving,1.2.2 we have selected essays, podcasts, and films offering provocations for the following four questions surrounding memory, power, and knowledge facing archivists in and of the “human epoch.”

What genres, exclusions, and injustices inform an archive?

Archives are spaces where power is negotiated, contested, and ultimately consolidated. They are characterized as much by the materials they include as by those they do not as well as the injustices that such exclusions threaten to reproduce. Archiving in the Anthropocene involves attending to these imposed closures and silences. Professor of history Scott Knowles and museum director Ashley Rogers’s essay “Layers of Violence,”1.2.3 for example, provides an instructive model for doing so, by considering how plantation landscapes1.2.4 serve as archives from which to think about the “remarkable anthropocenic continuity” between the American South’s slave economy, the Jim Crow era, and the present-day system of petrochemical production—three periods typically treated as separate in traditional historiography.

Inclusivity, however, cannot be simply equated with equity. Archival inclusions can often serve as another way of exploiting already vulnerable communities. As researchers and activists Maya Indira Ganesh, Shana M. griffin, and Sadie Luetmer each highlight in their discussion of their diverse approaches to fieldwork,1.2.5 scholars and practitioners should be attentive to the unequal flows of knowledge that shape the conditions under which research is conducted. They urge us to ask: When are our practices with communities extractive? When are we engaged in witnessing? And how can epistemic justice become a form of restorative justice?

What kind of public does an archive produce?

What would it mean for an archive to produce its own public? Can archival narratives be a form of public memory that runs counter to the forces of exclusionary privatization? Such questions can be found in poet and educator Treasure Shields Redmond’s River Memory podcast,1.2.6 which collects oral histories of the Mississippi River from St. Louis residents, who present the waterscape in ways that are nearly inconceivable today. At a time when the river’s power has been harnessed by industrialization and private capital, these narratives draw attention instead to subjective histories of the river, approaching it as a source of love, joy, adventure, and spirituality for diverse publics.

Creative archival work related to multinational corporations opens up further avenues for studying anthropocenic dynamics as well as the creation of publics. Photographer Jennifer Colton and creative practitioner Matthew Fluharty take a close look at Sauget, Illinois, formerly known as Monsanto Town,1.2.7 the founding site of the infamous agrochemical company, in their project “Monsanto Town.” While Monsanto has ceased its activity in Sauget—and is slowly losing visibility after being taken over by Bayer in 2018—the town remains an industrial hotspot, as journalist Scott Beauchamp points out in his report in Belt Magazine.1.2.8 Colton and Fluharty turned to Monsanto archives, housed at the Washington University in St. Louis and State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia, where they encountered rich documentation of labor conditions and everyday life in the company town. Combining archival records with contemporary photography, the two artists further organized a mobile exhibition at Sauget Village Hall to bring the town’s community of 150 people together.

The “Monsanto Town” project’s focus on a single but widely influential company bears resemblance to the Formosa Plastics Global Archive (台灣塑膠檔案館).1.2.9 A research and advocacy effort, the digital archive is designed to support a transnational community concerned with the operations of one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies. Originally founded in 1954 in Taiwan, Formosa Plastics now operates in Vietnam, China, and the Southern United States, with a long track record of industrial disaster both fast and slow. A particular focus of the project is how data sharing can support and inspire ongoing litigation against the company. Exemplary material includes courtroom sketches1.2.10 that highlight the dynamics of a tort case over toxicity levels in Central Taiwan, alongside the extensive documentation generated from a $50 million settlement against Formosa Plastics in Texas, based on leaked company records1.2.11 and the monitoring of plastic pellets discharged into local waterways.1.2.12 The project brings to the fore a crucial double bind, as such archives need to be global in scope but also tuned to the specific data needs of communities on the ground.

Which forms of data and participation can an archive be designed to support?

By situating human history within the broader ambit of geological deep time, the Anthropocene invokes diverse forms of historical data, integrating different fields of research and practice in the joint task of historical narration. As historian Thomas Turnbull writes, in the Anthropocene the “distinction between field and archive dissolves.”1.2.13 Oral history, geological records, hydrological observation—all are implicated in a larger conversation around the causes, consequences, and origins of contemporary planetary dynamics.

Archives are also sites for anticipating uncertain futures. In their collaborative contribution to the Anthropocene Curriculum project, geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and illustrator Anne-Sophie Milon imagine the work of “far-future archaeologists” and how they might encounter the remains of our “technosphere.”1.2.14 Zalasiewicz narrates the deep-time development of a rock outcrop in Wales, paralleling it with a speculative account of a decomposing smartwatch, dumped into the compressed layers of a former landfill. For him, it remains an open question as to whether such speculations—with their power to estrange and question the novelty of our geological era—could serve as a guide for navigating the Anthropocene. In any case, Milon’s drawings that accompany the story remind us of the complex data and archival infrastructure that will be needed for near-term and future examinations of our technofossils.

What kind of infrastructure does an archive depend on?

Bringing anthropocenic continuities and injustices into view also means paying analytical attention to “datafication”: how archival objects have been turned into data. As anthropologist Tahani Nadim notes in her reflection on traveling the US Corn Belt,1.2.15 data are always the product of embodied forms of labor. For her, maize is a particularly striking example—a model organism that led to breakthroughs in epigenetics and early experiments in biological big data. The question for Nadim is how processes and histories of datafication can be better accounted for. One possible intervention, she argues, could be to expand the “metadata” of objects. In addition to describing the “properties” of objects, “provenance” metadata could better describe the data collection itself, mindful that such accounts will always be incomplete. The goal would rather be to draw out which decisions and classificatory systems drive the datafication of nature and which are sidelined.

Our key contribution that accompanies this pathway, “An Archival Epoch?,” presents some of our own speculative ideas about the role that archives and other knowledge infrastructures can play in knowing and responding to the Anthropocene. Revisiting many of the topics brought up throughout the pathway, we ask how practitioners can design and participate in archival projects that can contribute to the formation of interested publics and solidarity networks at both local and global scales.