Colonial Body Archives – A Media Studies Approach

Abstract

Abstract

This project explores contemporary knowledge practices related to colonial “body archives” in Europe, using a media studies approach. Focusing on the mediality of anthropometric and forensic techniques of identification from 19th century colonial anthropology to the present, the project will investigate the making, travelling and (attempts of) undoing of knowledges around human categories of difference.
The project's outcome is four-fold: 1) It will provide a problematization of anthropological and forensic knowledge practices with respect to their colonial hauntings. 2) The project will contribute to theoretical and methodological questions how to understand multiplicity and relationality with respect to colonial knowledge. 3) Furthermore the project will enable a fundamental reflection of ubiquitous metric-statistical knowledge practices more generally. 4) Last but not least the project will investigate possibilities to design novel research foci on colonial hauntings in order to take the situatedness and multiplicity of knowledge practices into account in order to fully grasp how these colonial legacies have come to operate in colonial collections. And at the same time, it will actively search for and experiment with innovative methodologies that enable unexpected approaches of problematization, decolonization, and reconciliation with respect to colonial body archives. The outcomes of the one-year project will be the submission of two papers to an international peer-reviewed journal (e.g. Science, Technology, and Human Values; Science as Culture), and a presentation or a joint panel for the 4S&EASST conference in Prague (Society for Social Studies of Science & European Association for the Study of Science and Technology), August 2020. On this basis the proposed study will lead to a larger, more comprehensive research proposal on how to de-colonialize archives of the body.