State of the Archives, Archives of the State: Methodological Challenges of Archival Research in Geography

Abstract

The articles in this Focus section offer critical interventions that will be useful not only to historical geographers but to any geographer who embarks on archival research, particularly research engaging with the state. The articles engage not only with the archive-as-source but with the scholar’s physical experience of the archive-as-site or archive-as-place. Consequently, it is not only the documents held in an archive that inform our research on the state but the state of the archives themselves as contested places that can help us read the state against the grain. The experiences of the researcher attempting to engage with an archive and the presences and absences in the collections offer important historical clues to understanding the nature of the state that produced the archives. Exploring these dynamics from different perspectives, the articles in this collection engage with the neoliberal, postcolonial, counterinsurgent, and carceral states. Key Words: archival research, archives, methodology, state.