Archive to Action: Connecting Coastal Community Insights to Policy (Carena seminar)
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Central
Archaeological and community archives are often treated as repositories of past events, collections of documents, images, and testimonies that record what has already happened. Yet archives can also be active infrastructures that shape how futures are imagined and governed. This paper explores how a community archive might move from being a record of change to a force for change, asking: how can archives become sites of engagement, challenge power imbalances, and matter within contemporary governance?
Focusing on Archive to Action, a project based around the Coasts in Mind (CiM) Community Archive, the paper examines how placebased records of coastal change can be mobilised within coastal risk governance. Cocreated with communities as an online digital platform, the CiM archive is designed not only to document lived experience but to render it accessible and usable by policymakers.
This paper contributes to wider debates about what archives do in the world: it reflects on both the potential and limits of community archives as futurefacing, interventionist spaces, and asks what it takes for an “archive” to become an active agent in shaping the future.
Contact name: Katy Pettit
Speakers-
Claire Harris, MOLA/QMUL
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Clare Harris is a Palaeolithic and intertidal archaeologist and public impact specialist working across MOLA’s Public Impact Team and Queen Mary University of London’s School of Society and Environment, where she contributes to the RACC project. Her work sits at the intersection of archaeology, environmental change, and community engagement, developing community-centred approaches that connect coastal heritage with contemporary conversations about climate adaptation and resilience.
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