As part of the ongoing 'Archiving from Below' series, this session will explore the militant research method known as 'workers’ inquiry' and how it might connect to questions around our own archival work and research. The session will be framed around two different ways we might approach workers’ inquiry in the archive. Firstly, how we might examine the working conditions and the labour involved in archiving, which is often invisible across institutions. Secondly, how ideas of co-research, central to the workers’ inquiry method, can avoid the process of pacification that often occurs in archival research of past struggles and instead bring them into conversation with ongoing struggles today.

This session will take a more open and interactive format, providing time and space to work through ideas and issues together.

This session is especially geared towards archivists and researchers working within archives, but all are welcome!