Authors, Activists, Archivists: A Dialogue with Francesca Orsini on Dalit Literature across Languages, Genre, Media

Abstract

In 2014, two sets of Dalit literature scholars based in the West started working on two different collaborative grant projects that announced themselves as ‘networks’: Nicole Thiara and Judith Misrahi-Barak received AHRC funding to organise a series of programmes for the Dalit Literature Network, and Christi Merrill and her colleagues at the University of Michigan received internal funding to develop a suite of digital tools called Translation Networks (TN). In this dialogue with Francesca Orsini, Merrill uses examples from the overlap between these two different networks to describe how the TN concept mapping tool helps users visualise underlying scholarly infrastructures they depend on and in the process disrupt many of the binaries and hierarchies built into conventional archiving tools.