Archival Ecologies: In the Burn Zone

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We’re excited to share Archival Ecologies with you!

It’s an original audio series created and hosted by Jayme Collins, who’s a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute. Archival Ecologies is produced by Blue Lab — an environmental media and storytelling group at Princeton led by Professor Allison Carruth.

Kouvenda Media partnered with Blue Lab on multiple projects, including working with Jayme and her team on Archival Ecologies.

Archival Ecologies investigates how fires, floods, mold blooms and other ecological events are affecting cultural collections and the artifacts and memories they preserve. As climate change leads to more extreme weather events, the interactions between archives and the environments where they reside are becoming increasingly frequent and fraught.

During the 2021 summer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the historic town of Lytton, BC and nearby First Nations reserves suffered a catastrophic wildfire that took local archives, museums and cultural collections with it. In this first season, the podcast tells the stories of those collections and the communities who have stewarded them.

Through the voices of those cultural stewards and knowledge keepers and the objects that have been lost (or salvaged), Archival Ecologies explores the interwoven histories and geographies of the region and the larger intersections between climate change, cultural preservation and recovery.

Listen to Archival Ecologies and other @bluelab.princeton productions at bluelab.princeton.edu and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Links of interest:

https://bluelab.allisoncarruth.com/projects/stories/archival-ecologies/