The social movement archive

Abstract

The Social Movement Archive is a collection of interviews and reproductions of political ephemera from American social movements compiled by information workers and volunteers at the Interference Archive Jen Hoyer and Nora Almeida. The book aims to disrupt both the ‘formal limitations of a book’ and ‘the tensions the archive produces’ within activism (1). This text joins an extensive body of publications which challenge the colonial foundations on which traditions of professional practice are built and imagines/surfaces alternative forms of archival practice within communities. However, the authors make an original contribution to this body of literature precisely by resisting the academicization of this work. As the authors write,