Rescuing the Archives from Foucault

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College English. istorians of rhetoric need to return to the archives. In calling for this return, and for a tempering of our recent preoccupation with historiographic theory, I join other historians, including some of the Octolog II panelists at CCCC 1997 ("Octolog"). I am somewhat reluctant to push the point: I like theory and have learned a great deal from those in our field who have advanced it, I believe fully the truism that even historians who deny theory operate nonetheless from a theory, and I don't want to be labelled conservative.There are past traditions worth preserving-foremost among them many nineteenthand twentieth-century research methodologies. Most rhetoric and composition graduate programs require students to be conversant with histories of rhetoric and even theories about historical writing, but few require that students be expert at standard research methodologies. Literature students are often schooled in such methods, which has contributed to ever-richer histories. Of course, some graduate students in rhetoric also take those literary research methods courses, and are better for having taken them. But that training leaves out much that is necessary to the rhetorical projects our discipline most needs to undertake. I would argue that it is this neglect of methodological training that more than anything else prevents us from writing "better" histories of rhetoric. What we need is the kind of archival training graduate students in departments of history undergo, training tailored to recovering the history of rhetorical practice and instruction. Katherine Arens argues persuasively that requisite research skills vary according to the humanities discipline under study.Conceptions of archives predating Foucault differ very little from those held by contemporary historians, and the theories of early historians and philosophersincluding Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thomas Macaulay, and Thomas Arnold-Linda Ferreira-Buckley is Chair of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She has co-edited an edition of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters (Southern Illinois University Press 1999) and has written on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British rhetoric.

Writing, archives and exhibits: Piloting partnerships between special collections and writing classes

“…These 'gifts' are framed as somewhat liberatory benefits for the field as a whole and are often adapted for related work (especially in Purdy, 2011 andHayden, 2015), but other scholars pointed to a lack of training and expertise in archival research in the field at large. Ferreira-Buckley (1999) identified the lack of organization of writing archives and, more pressingly, the lack of training in archival research methods and historiography in WS. Seeing a lack of training or emphasis in the 'tools of the historians' trade', Ferreira-Buckley called for more formal training in WS graduate curricula, with a particular emphasis on archival research methods (1999: 582).…”

The Archives as a Source of Social History: Studying Belonging of the Indian–Chinese Community

“…She states that while methodologies help researchers set their goals for research, it is the method that gives clues to how we get to the task of carrying out research. In the case of the study of archives, one goes back to the College English (CE) journal issue of 1999, where multiple authors (Buckley et al, 1999; Brereton, 1999) published about their own experience of working in the archives, and they raised several questions, as follows: What should be in the archive? How can we secure access? Which tools should be used to explore the past? What is present or missing in the context of the research in the archive? Can access now be improved upon in future through better techniques, and will the nature of access change too? …”

“…She states that while methodologies help researchers set their goals for research, it is the method that gives clues to how we get to the task of carrying out research. In the case of the study of archives, one goes back to the College English (CE) journal issue of 1999, where multiple authors (Buckley et al, 1999; Brerton, 1999) published about their own experience of working in the archives, and they raised several questions, as follows:1. What should be in the archive?…”

The Complexities of Unknowns: Knowledge Contestations and Occupational Disease Recognition

“…Though their own origins are often occluded and the exclusions on which they are premised upon often dimly understood, all archives come into being as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures -pressures which leave traces and which render archives themselves artifacts of history (6) The preservation and availability of certain records at particular archival sites has led to epistemological contestations around what historical research could offer, with more traditional accounts making positivist claims to objectivity and historical truths, while others have stressed the importance of considering how archival records are 30 See as well Ghosh (2005) who provides an illuminating discussion of this in relation to the differing influences that nationality and national identities have on the production of knowledge around colonial histories. As she notes, her research experiences varied significantly between the British and the Indian archives to the point where she realized that "what seemed like a great project in Britain was a terrible, even unspeakable one in India" (27) historically, socially and politically situated (Burton, 2005;Ferreira-Buckley, 1999;Ghosh, 2005;Tamoukou, 2014). This has led to the general recognition that historical knowledge will always be limited to some extent.…”