MEDIA STUDIES SYMPOSIUM 2026

Papering Over Audiovisual Archives

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

Papering Over Audiovisual Archives
Papering Over Audiovisual Archives

REGISTRATION

The deadline to register for this event is Thursday, November 12.

Papering Over Audiovisual Archives

PROGRAMME

Papering Over Audiovisual Archives

Symposium Dinner

Additional to the symposium, you can also join a special dinner on the evening of November 19. This ticket is purchased separately.

Papering Over Audiovisual Archives

Coffee and refreshments

All symposium registrations include coffee and refreshments during the breaks and lunch provided at the venue.

Papering Over Audiovisual Archives

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