Archives never document the ‘truth’ of the carrying out and practices of state agencies and the activities
of state officials; however, state archives carry in them the presuppositions and in the marginalia ‘the
pulse of the archive’ (Stoler, 2009). This pulse is produced by the people contributing to and maintaining
the archive, and through them the power of the documents in the archive to produce knowledge and
truth, of the state’s conceptions of borders and a state’s conception of how the world works. Studying
this pulse of the state archive is complicated when studying contemporary archives. The pulse of the
archive is in contrast to the living pulses of those archiving and those who are the focus of the archive.
In this paper, I explore the tensions in this ‘double pulse’, and call into questions the clarity of
distinctions between ‘archived’ practices and the process of archiving by individuals and institutions.I
use the case study of sustained engagement and research investigating the Irish Refugee Appeals
Tribunal Archive to present the importance - practically and theoretically - in understanding these
tensions and integrating these tensions into the work and the practice of archival ethnography.
I propose that this this approach is important in developing a framework of the role of archives in
understanding state power and practically useful in answering Mountz’s call to, in response to changing
practices of border enforcement, “write to and through the state, to understand just what kind of state we are in” (Mountz, 2010, p. 168).
Mots clés : archives|digital|migration|border enforcement|data
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