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.

Call for Papers

The symposium is open to media historians, archivists, artists and media professionals doing archive-based work. We invite papers that shine a light on the use of paper archives in the writing of media histories. Papers that showcase the theoretical and methodological versatility of paper archives in media historical research are particularly welcome. We are interested in contributions that deal with archived paper (paper preserved as historical records) as well as archival paper (catalogues, index cards, maps, etc.). The following topics can serve as a point of inspiration, however proposals do not need to be limited to these:

• 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.

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to msc@fiatifta.org by May 31st, 2026.

Queries can be sent to Alec Badenoch (Utrecht University) or Dana Mustata (University of Groningen).