This international, interdisciplinary roundtable discusses if and how emotions matter(ed) to both the people whose histories are documented by archives and to those working with the documents these contain. It puts archivists and historians—scholars and practitioners from different settings, geographical provenance, and stages of career, as well as the audience/broader public—in conversation with one another to examine the interplay of a broad range of emotions and archives, traditional and digital across national and disciplinary borders, and the social and civic consequences of taking emotions into account.

Such dialogue is crucial, urgent, and overdue. Assumptions of objectivity and emotionless impartiality have long garnered a high status and a sort of neutral high ground to both archives and academic archival research. In recent years, assumptions of emotionless objectivity have rightly been challenged and accepted ways of writing history broadened. The roundtable will discuss some of the ways in which this has been and is being done. It will provide an overview of how archivists have increasingly been acknowledging the impact of emotions on processes of appraisal and management, for instance, and how historians in turn have recognized the fact that the sources at their disposal have been filtered through emotional dynamics and have an emotional fallout on people and societies at large.

Once emotions are appreciated, however, the issue arises of how to avoid losing sight of the essential work of authentication, classification, management, and accessibility that has enabled the maintenance of a measure of integrity in both archival and historical practice. As both the archival and the historical professions legitimately investigate the roles of subjectivity and emotionality while recognizing and correcting mechanisms of exclusion at various stages in the archival and research life-cycles, the need emerges to renegotiate a number of archival and historical concepts as well as the disciplinary and societal norms governing what is preserved and how it can be accessed. Notwithstanding their power struggles and emotional dynamics, archives—including also archival work and research—have provided a useful set of tools to trace the provenance(s) of documents, to follow other people’s steps, and, more generally, to provide a number of guarantees. A renewed set of best practices is required to rediscuss archives as well as archival concepts and definitions once their subjectivity and emotionality have been postulated by all involved.

This roundtable does not seek to provide this new set of best practices but explores a range of questions that are crucial for its crafting. It also offers insights into ongoing discussions on broader related questions by involving leading figures in the historical, archival and emotions fields and by opening the debate to broader audiences.