01.07.2026 Short Speaker Series: Community Archives - from the Middle East & Its Diasporas

Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict Network

The "Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict Network" is excited to announce the first lecture of its Short Speaker Series.

On July 6, anthropologist, community archivist and activist Dr. Mina Ibrahim will speak about "Community Archives as Sites of Memory and Justice: Insights from the Middle East and Its Diasporas“.

Save the Date:
📅 Monday, 06.07.2026
⏰ 18:00-19.30
📍 Room 105 (SEM +1/0050), Pilgrimstein 12, Marburg University.

What happens when official archives are inaccessible, or when they are lost during conflict? What happens when what remains for survivors of wars and dictatorships is not an institutional record, but a family album, a memory of a television series, or a fragment of an everyday object?

This talk is an invitation to think about the entanglement of archival and ethnographic methods that emerge from particular political conditions and historical events in the Middle East. These methods do not merely expose the power relations embedded in the making of colonial and postcolonial archives. They draw attention to community-driven, diasporic forms of memory work that should not only be framed as alternatives to official archives, or simply as critiques of them. Rather, they create innovative ways of relating to the past, and other possibilities for narrating lives shaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarian rule.

More information: https://www.postcolonial-hierarchies.net/community-archives-as-sites-of-memory-and-justice-insights-from-the-middle-east-and-its-diasporas/