Join us for our twelfth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives.

The group will meet on Wednesday, April 19, 2017, from 6:30-8 pm at Alcove Cafe (1929 Hillhurst Ave, Los Angeles 90027). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email hello@laacollective.org to reserve a spot.

We will be reading two articles: “A Critique of Social Justice as an Archival Imperative: What Is It We're Doing That's All That Important?” by Mark Greene (American Archivist, Fall/Winter 2013) and a response by Mario Ramirez, "Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative" (American Archivist Fall/Winter 2015)

You can access the articles here and here.

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the articles? Let us know!

Join us for our eleventh reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives.

The group will meet on Tuesday, February 7, 2017, from 6:30-8 pm at Taix (1911 W Sunset Blvd, Echo Park, in the bar room). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email hello@laacollective.org to reserve a spot.

We’re changing it up a bit by reading an article! Our next selection is “Public In/Formation” by Shannon Mattern. Places Journal, November 2016

Librarians in formation: Joan Spencer, Mildred Handy, Mollie Huston Lee, Beatrice Hamlin, and Maude Young, at the Richard B. Harrison Library, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1968. Lee founded the library, which was the first in Raleigh to serve African Americans. [Wake County Public Libraries]

You can access the article here.

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!

Join us for our ninth reading and meeting of the LAAC Book Club--where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives.

Our next book selection is An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures by Ann Cvetkovich

Publisher’s Description: In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

The group will meet on Thursday, August 25, from 6:30-8 pm at Taix (1911 W Sunset Blvd, Echo Park, in the bar room). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot.

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!