Session Abstract

Recent scholarship has revealed the agency of paper at work in the production and ongoing life of many sites of knowledge production – correspondence, books, archives, libraries, museums, and bureaucracies, to name just a few. This roundtable convenes scholars representing a wide range of disciplinary and professional perspectives (history, media studies, museum work, library management) to reflect on productive ways of understanding paperwork as a technology vital to knowledge-making in many different arenas. Each participant will focus on one or two specific “paper objects” drawn from his or her unique research trajectories and professional experience as a way of suggesting how we might conceive of paper-at-work as object of analysis as well as actor in the production of knowledge for an audience broadly interested in paperwork as both topic and tool of historical investigation.