MEDIA STUDIES SYMPOSIUM 2026
Papering Over Audiovisual Archives
November 19-20, 2026
Netherlands Institute for
Sound and Vision
Hilversum, The Netherlands
The FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Commission together with the Entangled Media Histories invite you to a two-day international symposium to be held at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision on 19-20 November 2026.
The symposium focuses on paper archives and their uses in media historical research. The aim is to foreground these discussions as points of departure for showcasing the value of paper archives in media historiography and their indispensable contributions to appraising and valorising audiovisual archival records.
HOST
TOPICS OF INTEREST
- paper archives as signifiers of archiving politics
- (re)orientations towards politics of digitisation, preservation and archival
access - practices of appraising historical records and their archival value
- intermediality in archive-based media histories
- archival precarity
- the gendering of paper archives
- paper archives and women’s media histories
- paper and (gendered) archival labour
- embodied approaches to archives
- archival paper (catalogues, inventories, memos, etc.) and its digital afterlives
- materiality of paper records
- silences in the archives as orientations towards re-sounding and re-visioning the archives
- polyvocality in the archives and imaginative processes of historical meaning-making
- paper archives as grounds for self-reflexivity in institutional media archives