In fall 2024, Distinguished Professor Matt Sparke co-authored the Politics journal article “Alternative archives: Researching politics with chunks of reality,” which explores how access to information today is frequently blocked by the interests of political management, corporate monopoly, and surveillance capitalism.
At the same time, digital archives, social media, blogs, global communications, and even the tools of authoritarian control create innumerable alternative access points for research. In this article, the authors describe these other access points as “alternative archives,” and, in doing so, seek to highlight three overlapping definitions of their alternative status in terms of (1) empirical, (2) counter-hegemonic, and (3) epistemic meanings.