Posted by Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues, Bram Ieven, Sanne Rotmeijer and Bareez Majid on 2026-07-21
Although storytelling is usually not seen as one of the core tasks of traditional institutional archives, through their selection processes and ways of organising archival material these archives do have a significant impact on the directions that stories of cultural heritage can take. And like many stories on cultural heritage, traditional archives will make an effort to develop a rich but coherent collection; this may require them to downplay the multidirectional meaning of archival items, and to avoid direct friction or even contradiction between archival items. This also has implications for the stories and items that are not being archived – these untold stories and artefacts may complicate the dominant cultural narrative that the archive caters to.
In the past ten years, we have seen increasing awareness of the role of storytelling through archival collections. This is evident in large cultural heritage initiatives that have actively started to use storytelling (cf. the EU financed Europeana archive’s ‘stories’ page), it is evident in how communities have started to use storytelling to give themselves voice through community-based archives (cf. the South Asian American Digital Archive), and it is evident in critical scholarship on archives and storytelling that has been published in recent years (o.a. Zanish-Belcher 2019; Duffy 2020; Bessette 2023).
These initiatives and inquiries foreground the role of archives in forming and disseminating collective memory and fostering tools for (self-)representation. These developments have led to some inspiring explorations of the creative role of (visual) storytelling in the field of archival studies (e.g., Little 2011 and Bessette 2023). However, we argue that bringing these archival studies approaches in a dialogue with reflections on the creative potential of storytelling for cultural and historical research that have been developed in postcolonial thought (Hartman 2008), performance studies (Sabiescu 2020), and in research in creative writing (Cook 2013) will advance its theoretical and methodological implications.
The special collection “Restor(y)ing the archive” invites contributions in the form of academic articles and creative interventions that are suitable for a publishing format (e.g., photo essays, creative writing, visual arts) that reflect on how and in what form storytelling can recover lived experiences and significant practices that have been excluded from or could not be fully captured by institutional archives. We invite contributions in such fields as Cultural Studies, Film, Literary and Performance Studies, Cultural and Visual Anthropology, Archival Science, History, and Artistic Research that engage with case studies in the form of archival records from institutional, community-based or family archives, community stories emerging from what is and what is not archived, as well as artistic fictional and documentary narratives that creatively reflect on and (re-)imagine archival presences and absences. The topics include, but are not limited to:
· Explorations of the transformative power of (visual) storytelling to counter or re-envision dominant archival records and narratives
· Explorations of the imaginary possibilities, ethical demands, and conceptual implications of storytelling as a way of rethinking the archive and its role in cultural heritage
· Reflections on possibilities and limitations in intervening into existing narratives and creating imaginary records through community engagement, critical fabulation, as well as through artistic practice
· Reflections on what remains fleeting and unarchivable, its affective impact on the communities involved and the potential of storytelling to engage with such absence
· Critical engagements with the methodological challenges that different forms of storytelling pose for the archive
· Theoretical reflections on how stories and storytelling play a pivotal role in our understanding of an archive
Expression of interest and submission guidelines
Research articles:
Please contact the guest editors with your expression of interest to submit an article for the Special Collection including an abstract of 250-350 words by 30 September 2026. Please email Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues via artives@hum.leidenuniv.nl using ‘Restor(y)in the archive’ as the email subject. If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to work with the guest editors prior to the submission to ensure coherence with the authors guidelines and with the thematic scope of this Special Collection. The word count for the articles is up to 8000 words. All research articles should follow the OLH Author Guidelines to be found at https://olh.openlibhums.org/site/author-guidelines/.
Creative interventions:
We invite authors of creative interventions to contact the guest editors by 30 September 2026, prior to the submission of the complete work, to discuss their ideas on the format of their contribution and publishing possibilities. Please email Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues via artives@hum.leidenuniv.nl using ‘Restor(y)in the archive’ as the email subject.
Final submissions are due by 28 February 2027 and will be sent using the OLH portal: https://olh.openlibhums.org/submissions/. All research articles will need to pass a double blind peer review process to be accepted for publication.
Information about the publisher
This collection will be published in the Open Library of Humanities Journal (OLHJ) (ISSN 2056-6700). The OLHJ is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded diamond open-access journal with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLHJ has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries.
To learn more about the publisher, the Open Library of Humanities, please visit: https://www.openlibhums.org/
Photo by Sanne Rotmeijer; part of the decoration curated by Tamar Stalenhoef and Flox Aalberts for the piece TRACK: Sample, Scratch & Rewind (Theatre Rotterdam, 2025)