HIPS program 2022, 3 CEU credits
Instructors: István Rév, Ioana Macrea-Toma
18 sessions: 16 sessions of lectures and archival immersion, 2 archival visits
-individual consultations with Darius Krolikowski for video productions/ with Zsuzsa Zadori: Treasure hunt consultancy
Description of the internship
Archives belong to the category of specific public spaces: usually open only to predetermined categories of the public, defined and regulated either by the institution, legislative bodies, state authorities or by custom. Archives (their professional work, the documents they store, the trust they possess) play a defining role in the way history is represented, made use of, and instrumentalized in the public sphere.
Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) is not a state institution, but a private archival laboratory in the service of the public, legally part of the Central European University. Its primary holdings are related to the World War II divided world order and its contested history and to grave violations of human rights worldwide. OSA thus have an unusually rich collection of documents produced by or reported on clandestine activities, real or imagined figures of political oppositions, activists, politicians, private citizens who spoke truth to power.
OSA has been engaged in the program series on fearless speech that includes seminars, public actions, film screenings, performances and an exhibition due to open on 16 March.
In the five-week internship the HIPS students will get acquainted with the theoretical background of archival work, the way archives operate unseen by the visiting public, the practice of historians and archivists working in archival institutions. Theoretical lectures and hands-on archival research work will help future public historians to further understand the logic and epistemic assumptions of Cold War data collections and to translate issues having a Central and Eastern European relevance to larger global frameworks. The students will therefore be able to understand archives not just as sources, but as wholesale historical documentary projects, necessitating archival care and constant re-contextualization.
Learning Outcomes:
-methodological: students learn the problems associated with archival use and exhibiting, how to produce a video piece with archival documents
-students learn to critically approach primary archival sources and integrate sources for curatorial purposes, students learn to write captions, curatorial comments and contextualize the sources
-theoretical and historical: notions history of truth-telling, Cold War, dissident cultures