A virtual fellows forum with Melissa Adler, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario from August 18, 2022.
Presentation Abstract:
On September 6, 1789, Jefferson’s delivered one of his most famous declarations in a letter to his friend and colleague James Madison. He insisted upon his belief that rights to land must belong to the living—that “the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Jefferson maintained that the role of the founding fathers was to establish a republic in which the coming generations of educated citizens would be in control of their own destiny. They would not be bound by the past, but rather, each generation has an obligation to future progress. At the same time, it is important to understand the information architectures and ordering principles developed and deployed here at Monticello during the peak of American colonial expansion and revolution as indeed marked and inscribed by loss.
Dwelling in the very spaces in which the colonial imaginary has been given shape and substance can unsettle knowledge organization techniques in libraries, archives, and museums by drawing attention “toward questions of how that particular social order was able to emerge and at what costs” (Snaza 2018, 21). Adler’s research aims to think about the ways that the configuration of knowledge was instrumental to colonial expansion, and unearth the ghostly kin that inhabit knowledge organization systems of the present.