Seeking Glimpses: Reflections on Doing Archival Work

This article explores the role of archival research in understanding and generating social histories from the perspectives of four different doctoral students as they reflect on their archival research experiences. We argue that archival research is complex, subjective, contextual, and at times, incomplete. Our various perspectives address ideas of privilege, representation, what it means to remember (or forget), how archives are constituted and reconstituted, and where we can make meaning in archival spaces. This article demonstrates that although archival research has had a presence in Composition and Rhetoric for some time, that presence is continually shifting, and even when embarking on archival research with comparable exigencies, the undertaking and experiences of that work is inconsistent. This article, therefore, explores the inconsistencies present in archival work, arguing that part of understanding archival research is understanding varied archival research experiences, perspectives, and understandings