CAPTION: “Forest Listening Rooms,” Shawnee, Ohio. Brian Harnetty, pictured above, listens with participants at a coal mine recovery site. Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sonic artist, visiting GAH fellow and contributor to Archival Engtanglements.
On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities
The Global Arts + Humanities (GAH) is committed to an institutional ecology of cross-disciplinary exchange that draws on artistic and humanistic approaches to societal challenges and facilitates public engagement. GAH’s book series, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities, is one of several initiatives that fosters broad public engagement and national recognition.
Produced in partnership with the Wexner Center for the Arts and The Ohio State University Press, On Possibility foregrounds the importance of cross-disciplinary exchange as a mode of generating new forms of knowledge. Each volume engages with the annual theme of the Society of Fellows program. Archival Entanglements, the series’ second volume, emerged from the 2022-23 theme, “Archival Imaginations,” which explored how existing, emergent or imagined archives reveal dominant histories as well as gaps in the record. The book advances relational knowledge-making — framing the archive as a vital space that both preserves the past and shapes futures yet to be imagined.
Archival Entanglements
Edited by GAH Associate Director Puja Batra-Wells and Associate Professor of Dance, Harmony Bench, Archival Entanglements brings together contributors from diverse fields — including performance, labor studies, history and visual arts — whose work spans digital and data-driven research as well as artistic and scholarly engagement with physical collections.
The volume approaches the archive as a formation entangled with power and ongoing struggles over representation. Contributors examine how practices of preservation and access participate in regimes of violence and surveillance while also tracing how communities mobilize archives for recovery and repair. In this context, the volume presents the archive as inherently plural — simultaneously relational and material, constrictive and enabling.
Towards Critical Humility
The editorial team embodied an uncommon collaboration, bridging disciplines and institutional positions — between folklore and dance, and between staff and faculty. The volume’s editorial orientation treats disciplinary differences as productive friction rather than problems to be resolved. This stance enacts critical humility, acknowledging the limits of any single method, archive, or domain. Editorial practice is thus facilitative, enabling dialogue, comparison and humble theorizing that is accountable to what archives can and cannot sustain.
Prepublication working groups further shaped the volume by creating opportunities for contributors to identify connections across their research and creative practices and enact the cross-disciplinary exchange that the series foregrounds.