How to make the archive speak? This entry by Nicole Immler is about rethinking more deeply the oral history archive—an archive in which hitherto “unheard voices” will be voiced in ways they might more easily and differently listened to. This means going beyond being solely an academic depository, but being dialogical in multiple ways: the Multivoiced Archive as I call it. It is an experiment with displaying and connecting the oral (hi)stories of different victimized groups, struggling for the recognition of their experiences of historical injustice such as the Holocaust, colonial violence, slavery, and other forms of institutional violence and their long-term repercussions. The idea is that connecting these unheard (hi)stories, we learn to listen to and hear multivoicedness. While multivoicedness is generally associated with displaying multiple perspectives next to each other, the Multivoiced Archive operationalizes the lens of the dialogical self, the multivoicedness of individuals, in which voices of others resonate. This allows us to see connections that permit a more complex understanding of questions of recognition, repair, and justice. By utilizing the concept of multivoicedness this essay explores in which way interview collections could be more meaningful for the field of transitional justice, namely, to better serve justice ends. The archive’s role in the transitional justice field is hitherto underexplored, specifically as active agents, as “Transitional Archives” or “Reparative Archives.” The concept of the Multivoiced Archive aims to push theory and practice further and to reconsider academic data repositories as being potentially reparatory.

Read the full article here.

the Multivoiced Archive can be accessed here.