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The aim of this master’s thesis in archival science is to understand how four individuals’ use or creation of archival records affects the experience of social, cultural, and ethnic belongingness in time and space. The questions investigated are: 1) How do the individuals conceptualize the records' origin and how do this affect their interpretations of past and present time? 2) Which stories about belongingness appear when the individuals tell about the records and how do these relate to themselves and their surrounding world? 3) How can activation of the records related to places, persons, and relationships become meaningful? The study is a part of a poststructuralist tradition that focuses on microhistories, versatility, and changes. The data is collected through four in-depth interviews and the material is theorized and analyzed through a phenomenological perspective, postmodern archival theory, narrative analysis, deconstruction, and the archive’s semantic genealogy. This makes it possible to get an insight in the individuals' experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories, and how they orientate themselves in the world and relate to other people, records, places, and stories. Stories have the ability to create structure and meaning. Here it is being actualized in the stories of the records, but also in the stories the individuals tell about them and how they become a part of their own life histories. The analysis also makes it possible to understand the overall contexts, how they have affected the content in the records, and how the individuals do to look beyond the records. The results show how the individuals’ lives are integrated in a historical, spatial, cultural, relational, and existential context. Through the stories they have been told, the interpersonal relationships throughout their lives, the places they feel belongingness to, and the records they use, they create links through time and space. The stories of records contain tracks of the past that can be deconstructed in the sense of perspectives, power, and substance. All these parts have the ability to add new details and understandings of their life histories, their related ones, the personal and collective narratives, specific places, the world that has been, and the world that is now. By combining several sources, materials, records, and stories, it is possible to get a more profound and clearer understanding of where the individuals come from, where they are now, and what they extend into the future. This gives insights into how using archives can be understood as significant on different levels, and how the activity can become meaningful by adding new stories, relationships, and knowledge to individuals’ lives. This is a two years master's thesis in Archival science. |
