Disorderly Archives and Orderly Accounts: Reflections on the Occasion of Glasgow's Geographical Centenary

Abstract

The Centenary of Geography at the University of Glasgow has occasioned a gathering together of various materials that illuminate 100 years of teaching and researching the subject in this ancient seat of learning. Visits to the University Archives to recover the ‘official’ record from Court and Senate Minutes, and much else besides, have been supplemented by foraging through and in departmental rooms, cupboards, shelves and filing cabinets, sometimes intruding into the personal ‘holdings’ of colleagues. The result has been to assemble what might be said to comprise the department's Geography ‘archive’, incomplete and fragmentary as it undoubtedly remains. The present paper offers reflections on this archive, considering the different registers of order and disorder that it embraces. In addition, critical attention is given to the different modes of recounting Glasgow Geography's history that can be constructed with these varying archival remains. The objective is to open windows, orderly and otherwise, on Glasgow's Geographical Centenary, but also to wonder at what might be gained by allowing more disorder into the archive.

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