Paperwork/Paper-at-work

AHA Session 257
Monday, January 5, 2015: 8:30 AM-10:30 AM
Central Park East (Sheraton New York, Second Floor)
Chair:
Florence C. Hsia, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Panel:
Lisa Gitelman, New York University
Neil F. Safier, John Carter Brown Library
Elizabeth Yale, University of Iowa
Comment:
Ann M. Blair, Harvard University

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.

See more of: AHA Sessions