7 - 13 June 2021 | 3:00 - 8:00 PM (Indian Standard Time)

25+ Sessions 80+ Voices 5+ Countries

Archivists | Designers | Lawyers | Activists | Developers | Curators | Academics | Community Organisers | Artists | Writers | Students…. coming together for a set of informal online events

Zoom Registration Link : http://bit.ly/Milli-IAW2021

Session recordings, notes and resources : Session recordings, notes and resources

Jun 7 | Empower

Archives Speed Dating | Social Justice | History | Research

An Archives Flyover! Dozen Archives Across India, Present and Future

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  • Jun 7, 15:00 - 16:30
  • Description
    • A walkthrough of about a dozen archives – national, state, family, community, individual, corporate, thematic. Each gets three minutes to tell us what they collect, and how people can access it. And then, we all come together. What makes an archive?
  • Participants
    • The 1947 Partition Archive
    • Archives of Indigenous Communities of Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve
    • Ashoka University Archives
    • Bajaj Archives
    • Centre for Community Knowledge, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University
    • Centre for Studies in Social Sciences
    • French Institute of Pondicherry
    • Kerala State Archives
    • National Archives of India
    • National Institute of Design Archives
    • Pattani Family Archives
    • St Johns Research Institute
  • Moderator
    • Venkat Srinivasan (Milli Collective)

Archiving Protests

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  • Jun 7, 16:45 - 17:45
  • Description
    • In late November 2020, farmers arrived at Delhi’s borders from far and wide to resist new laws that would ensure corporate control over agriculture. This panel will explore the process of creating a digital archive of the farmers’ movement, taking a longer historical time frame into view.
  • Participants
    • Yogesh Snehi (Dr. B.R.Ambedkar University)
    • Radhika Krishnan (IIIT Hyderabad)
  • Moderator
    • Ganeev Dhillon (The Partition Museum)

Archives and Research

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  • Jun 7, 18:00 - 19:00
  • Description
    • What role do the archives play in scholarly research? How do researchers encounter unexplored collections and what are the avenues available to preserve these records? In this panel, speakers will share their research stories and their experiences with using and creating archives.
  • Participants
    • S. Irfan Habib (Historian of Science and Politics)
    • Abhishek Bhattacharyya (University of Chicago)
    • Zoé E. Headley (Le Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud)
  • Moderator
    • Priyanka Seshadri (Milli Collective)

Preserving Memories: Some Secret Recipes

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  • Jun 7, 19:15 - 20:00
  • Description
    • S. Girikumar (Art Conservator) will discuss some sustainable measures for the long term preservation of archival materials like documents, photographic prints and negatives, films, and electronic media. The talk will be followed by an interactive session.
  • Participant
    • S. Girikumar (Art Conservator)

Jun 8 | Include

WHERE DOES KNOWLEDGE RESIDE? : ARCHIVING COMMUNITY HISTORIES

Knowledge | Community | Oral History | Memory

Reclaiming the Archives

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  • Jun 8, 15:00 - 16:00
  • Description
    • New ways and means of imagining the archives. Archiving with communities and the place of community records and histories.
  • Participants
    • Ashish Birulee and Hamari Jamatia (Adivasi Lives Matter)
    • Minket Lepcha and Chhaya Namchu (Independent)
  • Moderator
    • Faisal Rehman (Milli Collective)

To Whom Does the Archive Speak?

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  • Jun 8, 16:05 - 17:25
  • Description
    • Community representation and the need to document, archive and narrate their own stories. Contextual archive architectures, building and gathering community experiences and storytelling for the archives.
  • Participants
    • Dileep Prakash, Adira Thekkuveettil and Sheik Mohamed Ishaq (Anglo-Indian Archives)
    • Sumitra Sunder and Anahita Sarabhai (Queerabad)
    • Sumit Sisodiya and Rita Banerji (Green Hub)
  • Moderator
    • Ranjani M Prasad (Milli Collective)

Access for the ‘Archived’

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  • Jun 8, 17:30 - 18:25
  • Description
    • Can represented communities have agency over determining pathways to access the archives? What kind of knowledge sharing ethics govern community archives? On the many languages of an archive and how it interacts with dominant languages?
  • Participants
    • Kavita Devi (Khabar Lahariya)
    • Faisal Rehaman and Ranjani M Prasad (Keystone Foundation)
  • Moderators
    • Maya Dodd (Milli Collective)
    • Kumar Unnayan (Independent)

Pedagogical Deliberations on Community Histories

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  • Jun 8, 18:30 - 20:00
  • Description
    • How does the schooling system influence traditional societies’ ideas of their own histories? What avenues for inter-generational historical learning already exist amongst communities? How do these contribute to historical pedagogy? Exploring rural schools’ foray into teaching histories to adivasi children.
  • Participants
    • Amit Bhatnagar and Jayshree Bhalerao (Adharshila school for Bhil Children, Madhya Pradesh)
    • Sanket Jain (Insight Walk, Kolhapur)
  • Moderator
    • Aparna Vaidik (Milli Collective)

Jun 9 | Access

Governance | Law | Design | Ethics

Design for Access

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  • Jun 9, 15:00 - 16:15
  • Description
    • Who has access to the archive? How can archives support physical, intellectual and cultural access through their design and in their long-term development? How can the challenges presented by Covid-19 support rather than hinder an authentic access agenda? Staff, students and alumni from the MA Curating Collections and Heritage, University of Brighton (UK), address these questions in order to consider how the logic of the archive can engage with the requirements of the user. This panel will begin with short presentations considering case studies from our practice and research, and conclude with a roundtable discussion.
  • Participants
    • Sue Breakell (University of Brighton)
    • Suchi Chatterjee, Jen Grasso and Monna Matharu (University of Brighton)
  • Moderator
    • Claire Wintle (University of Brighton)

Information Governance and International Law

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  • Jun 9, 16:30 - 17:45
  • Description
    • What laws govern the archives internationally? What do these laws mean for those creating archives, and those accessing them? How do South Asian archivists and archive users build and access archives operating under international laws?
  • Participants
    • Elizabeth Lomas (University College London)
    • Shubha Chaudhuri (Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, American Institute of Indian Studies)
  • Moderator
    • Shubha Chaudhuri (Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, American Institute of Indian Studies)

Archives, Access and the Law: Ethics, Morals and Laws in Archives

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  • Jun 9, 18:00 - 19:30
  • Description
    • How does law shape access to archives in India? The session introduces a new guidebook to archives and the laws intended for archivists navigating legal issues in acquisition, access and use of archival records. lt also discusses policy issues relating to equitable access.
  • Participant
    • Divij Joshi (Centre for Policy Research)
    • Anubha Sinha (Centre for Internet and Society)
  • Moderator
    • Farah Yameen (Milli Collective)

Jun 10 | Connect

Glam | Networks | Annotate | Standards | Digital Archiving

Interoperability and Standards Across Archives

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  • Jun 10, 15:00 - 16:15
  • Description
    • Demystifying interoperability, standards, tools, controlled vocabularies, schema, and a whole bunch of acronyms: GLAM, ISAD(G), EAD, DACS, DC, MARC, XML….With input from libraries, archives, and museums.
  • Participants
    • Madhan M (Azim Premji University Library)
    • Madhura Wairkar (Museum of Art and Photography)
    • Christina Birdie (Former librarian and archivist, Indian Institute of Astrophysics)
    • Indira Chowdhury (Centre for Public History, Srishti)
  • Moderator
    • Vrunda Pathare (Godrej Archives)

Archive of the Algorithm of the Archive of the…

(This session is now cancelled. We apologise for the inconvenience)

Ways of Seeing : An Archive Annotation Workshop

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  • Jun 10, 16:30 - 18:30
  • Description
    • Ideas from Milli Prototype platform for democratizing archival description. Trying one’s hand at online annotation of archival objects. Bringing in unique challenges to ‘standard’ tools from specific archives: Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA), French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), Keystone Foundation, Whole Life Academy.
  • Participants
    • Milli Tech
    • Niruj (Qamra)
    • Faisal Rehman and Ranjani M Prasad (Keystone Foundation)
    • Stefan Aue (Whole Life)
    • Bharat S (French Institute of Pondicherry)
  • Moderator
    • Satakshi Sinha (Milli Collective)

An Overview of Digital Archiving and Preservation

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  • Jun 10, 19:00 - 20:00
  • Description
    • Broad conversations around the connections between the physical and digital, from digital preservation workflows to open source archival management systems, and more.
  • Participant
    • Gregory Wiedeman (University of Albany)
    • Trevor Owens (Library of Congress)
  • Moderator
    • Venkat Srinivasan (Milli Collective)

Jun 11 | Explore

Spaces | Cities | Migrations | South Asia | Repatriation

Archives and the City

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  • Jun 11, 15:00 - 16:30
  • Description
    • The city is not simply a geographical location but a set of relationships in space, both within city limits and outside the city’s demarcated boundaries. This panel explores what it means to capture a city’s history through the ‘archive’. How do archives grapple with the mobility of cities and their inhabitants, who move freely between the city and its hinterland? Can a city archive aspire to be more than just a repository of information, becoming instead an active component of the material and social infrastructure of urban spaces? This panel is an attempt at generating a critical discourse on city archives as active ingredients in a city’s collective existence. This holds true for smaller cities and towns as much as it does for the large metropolis. Archiving the city means, among other things knowing the city as a space of promise and aspiration as well as acts of everyday violence, it means learning to look at the city at different scales, and locating local histories within larger geopolitical frameworks.
  • Participants
    • Missing Basti Project
    • Malini Krishnankutty (IIT, Bombay)
    • Siddarth S. Ganesh (QAMRA, Bangalore)
    • Ayona Datta (University College, London)
  • Moderator
    • S. Bharat (French Institute of Pondicherry)

Archiving in and from South Asia (Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, India)

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  • Jun 11, 16:45 - 18:15
  • Description
    • Archiving is a vibrant, emergent field in South Asia. While many examples of archives and archival work outside of the bounds of the bureaucratic state exist in its history, we currently find ourselves in a new era of archival praxis, marked by the emergence of new media technology, digital humanities, and the ‘archival turn’ in social sciences and the humanities. This panel is an attempt to situate this emergent archival paradigm within the context of doing archival work in South Asia, and in the Global South more generally, by bringing together archivists working in different South Asian countries. What does it mean to do archival work in South Asian countries at this historical juncture? Are there shared concerns, challenges and promises and historically significant divergences? What can we learn from each other? We explore this central question along a number of different axes - archival standards and practices, the economics of funding, articulations of the digital and the analog, archival publics in South Asia, histories of conflict and violence, and many others.
  • Participants
    • Ali Usman Qasmi (Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan)
    • Nasir Javaid (Mushfiq Khwaja Trust for the Advancement of Knowledge and Culture, Pakistan)
    • Shamik Mishra (Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Nepal)
    • G. Sundar (Roja Muthiah Research Library, India)
    • Ponni Arasu (Queer feminist activitst, historian and lawyer, Sri Lanka)
  • Moderator
    • Aparna Vaidik (Milli Collective)

Cultural Heritage and the Imperial Past

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  • Jun 11, 18:30 - 20:00
  • Description
    • What does cultural heritage mean in a postcolonial context? How do we reimagine the ownership of cultural heritage, and what it means to ‘own’ heritage in the first place? This panel comprises researchers, museum curators and heritage conservationists spanning the UK and India who have been involved in reimagining cultural heritage histories in a postcolonial context, in spaces as diverse as the university classroom, the archive, and the museum, offering diverse interpretations of what ‘decolonising’ heritage, embodied in narratives, practices, and objects, might mean. Each of these contributions offers an individual insight on the situation in the UK and India, collectively they offer a timely contribution to a universal issue.
  • Participants
    • Iqbal Singh (The National Archives, United Kingdom)
    • Shalini Sharma (Keele University, United Kingdom)
    • Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS University of London)
    • Medhavi Gandhi (Heritage Lab)
    • Pramod Kumar (Eka Archiving Services)
  • Moderator
    • Shalini Sharma (Keele University, United Kingdom)

Jun 12 | Learn

Covid-19 | Care | Visualizing Archives | Digital Humanities

Archives and the Digital Humanities

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  • Jun 12, 15:00 - 16:30
  • Description
    • Panel of lightning talks that connects Archives and the Digital Humanities in various educational contexts:
    • How do pedagogues introduce archives into the classroom? For what purposes? How is pedagogical authority and intent problematized/complicated/subverted by the inherently authoritarian nature of an archive (etymological root in the Greek word arkhē, which means both commencement and commandment)? How can minority or non-normative subjectivities and politics be introduced through such pedagogical strategies based in archives?
    • What are some success stories/challenges/limitations that educators have faced in teaching with and through archives? Do digital archives work better in modern (the word can be interrogated) classrooms? Do such pedagogues necessarily identify as digital humanists? Why or why not?
  • Participants
    • Rishi Singhal and Amarnath Praful (National Institute of Design)
    • Parichay Patra (Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur)
    • Natasa Thoudam (Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur)
    • Ishita Shah (Curating for Culture)
    • Arjun Ghosh (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi)
    • Souvik Mukherjee (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata)
  • Moderator
    • Dibyadyuti Roy (Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur)

Learning Through Archives

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  • Jun 12, 16:45 - 18:15
  • Description
    • Showcase of Archival Projects related to Pedagogy (focus on student projects)
  • Participants
    • Siva Sai Jeeva (NID, Project with Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) Kashmir)
    • Pavithra Ramanujam (NID, Photo-retrospective of weddings in Tamil Nadu from the 70’s and the 80’s.)
    • Sohini Sengupta and Sourav Chattopadhyay( Presidency Plaques Project: A digital storytelling, mapping and archiving of the monuments within Presidency University as embodiments of collective memory)
    • Titas Bose (Delek Archives, Mapping Islamophobia and Casteism in Schools)
    • Ananya Pujary, Khushi Gupta, and Muskaan Pal (Community Cookbooks Archive: An open-access archive of community cookbooks from across India)
    • Subhradeep Chatterjee (Ephemeriad Project)
    • Eeshita Kapadiya (Bidar/Deccan Heritage)
  • Moderator
    • Tanishka Kachru (National Institute of Design)

Covid-19 Pandemic in India: Let’s Create an Archive That Cares

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  • Jun 12, 18:30 - 20:00
  • Description
    • To create a public archive of the Covid-19 pandemic in India, it is necessary to critically think about the roles of an archivist during crises and challenges of preserving ephemeral experiences. The first workshop in this series intends to serve as a platform for interested participants to engage, collaborate and immerse themselves on issues related to archiving and curating the collective memories of the pandemic. We invite participants with basic knowledge about archiving and who are passionate about cultural preservation, to work with us in creating and preserving this crowdsourced archival collection.
    • Link to Participation
    • Link to Contribution of Archival Material
    • For FAQs: www.curatingforculture.com
  • Moderators
    • Vallabhi Jalan (Curating for Culture)
    • Sanjna Girish (Archives at NCBS)
  • Schedule
    • Jun 6 - ‘Looking’ at the Pandemic with Dayanita Singh (Bookmaker and Photographer)
    • Jun 7 - Acknowledging the Crisis with Rebecca Adelman (Associate Professor, Media and Communication Studies, UMBC) Corona Virus Lost and Found https://pandemicarchive.com/
    • Jun 9 - A Dialogue on Archiving Emotions with Avantika Seth (Journalist, Researcher and Oral Historian) and Ben Gillespie (Arlene and Robert Kogod Secretarial Scholar for Oral History at Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)
    • Jun 11 - Curating a Public Experience with Banshanlang Marwein (The North East India Archive/ Khalm Archive) and Ishita Shah (Designer, Historian and Curator)
    • Jun 12 - Public Interface at International Archives Week, Milli Sessions 2021

Jun 13 | Narrate

Language | Art | Digital Adaptations

Digital Deccan

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  • Jun 13, 15:00 - 16:15
  • Description
    • From the Pandyas to the Portugese and beyond, the languages spoken across the shifting boundaries of the Deccan region of India serve up a fascinating archival challenge. This panel surveys the interconnections across these histories to relate the region’s pasts through a digital present.
  • Participants
    • Kurush Dalal (Live History India)
    • Ashutosh Potdar (Archive and Creative Practices)
    • Rochelle Pinto (Archive and Access)
  • Moderator
    • Maya Dodd (Milli Collective)

Urdu Across Indian Archives

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  • Jun 13, 16:30 - 17:45
  • Description
    • Though archives in Urdu exist across the South Asian region, this panel seeks to explore the variety of materials found in Urdu and Persian around Indian libraries and archives. These languages, while critical to understanding the larger history of the subcontinent, also offer an interesting path for future adaptations. Whether it is the popularity of poetry in Rekhta or gems of Indo-Islamic culinary heritage in the Rampur Raza library, new initiatives like the Urdu project are rearranging archival materials for new audiences in a digital age.
  • Participants
    • Mahtab Alam
    • Razak Khan
  • Moderator
    • Mahtab Alam

Artists and Archives

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  • Jun 13, 18:00 - 19:00
  • Description
    • Artists talking about their work that connects archival research represented through an art form – processes, experiences, issues, realisations. This panel seeks to hear the other side of the archival story; one from the users’ view, through artists adaptations of findings from the archives.
  • Participants
    • Pallavi Paul
    • Anuja Ghosalkar
    • Afrah Shafiq
  • Moderator
    • Arnika Ahldag (Museum of Art and Photography)

Open House | Steps Forward

  • Jun 13, 19:00 - 20:00

    All week | Literature and Archives: Resource Building Campaign

  • Description
    • What are your favourite published stories or poems that refer to or feature archives? Is there a novel, short story, poem or other form of literary work that you love, whether it is published in print or online, that helps us reimagine, question or simply wonder about archives and archiving? Help us build this resource by telling us about it! Link to Form
  • Co-ordinators
    • Shalom Gauri (B.R. Ambedkar University)
    • Sanjna Girish (Archives at NCBS)
    • Deepika S (Milli Collective)

Volunteers for Milli Collective

Aparna Vaidik; Arnika Ahldag; Athithya; Avarna Ojha; Avehi Menon; Bhanu Prakash; Bharat S; Deepika S; Devi Dang; Dharanee S; Dibyadyuti Roy; Dinesh TB; Divij Joshi; Divina Ann Philipose; Faisal Rehman; Farah Yameen; Hari Sridhar; Ishita Shah; Joel Louzado; Kishor Satpathy; Maya Dodd; Micah Alex; Padmini Ray Murray; Prasoon; Priyanka Seshadri; Ranjani Prasad; Samyabrata Roy; Sangeeta D; Sanjna Girish; Satakshi Sinha; Shafali Jain; Shalom Gauri; Sharanya Ghosh; Shreyasi; Shubha Chaudhuri; Shubhojeet Dey; Siddharth Ganesh; Spandana Bhowmik; Srijan Mandal; Tanishka Kachru; Vallabhi Jalan; Venkat Srinivasan; Vrunda Pathare

Session recordings, notes and resources