Blinken OSA’s Chief Archivist Csaba Szilágyi gave a talk in Dubrovnik

Blinken OSA’s Chief Archivist and Head of Human Rights Program Csaba Szilágyi gave a talk at the Divided Societies XXIII: Myths and Media course for international MA and Ph.D. students at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik (May 9-15, 2022). In his presentation entitled Metadata is Political: Creating Alternative Meanings in Records of Violent Past(s), which was based on collective work and research within the television monitoring materials of the Yugoslavia Archive Project, he spoke about how archival intervention and the agency and persona of the archivist impact descriptive standards and curatorial practices and result in multiple access points to records while making archives inclusive and multivocal. Empowering and bringing back those excluded, marginalized, or misrepresented into the archives is a necessary step in creating an archival infrastructure that supports bottom-up narratives centered around human rights and social justice claims and constitute alternatives to dominant, hegemonic narratives of conflicting and contested past(s).