Queer Archival Un/Making

Engaging Tangible Information Activism

Activities: Un/Making, Participatory Design, Qualitative Analysis

Year: 2023-25

We introduce queer archival un/making, which invites reflections on queer identities and community archives, towards information activist engagements that give access to vital resources and connections to LGBTQIA+ knowledge. We hosted workshops where participants created buttons by drawing and collaging with materials from the Queer Zine Archive Project, then embedded buttons with their own personal oral histories using our system, Queerios, developed in collaboration with Matthew Mosher. 

Publications

Un/Making

deepening design methods

Un/making: a continuum of making and unmaking practices, an alternative to normative forms of making in HCI (Song et al. 2024), and a "playful, half serious, yet deeply political form of computational subversion" that exists outside of productive norms (Gaboury 2018). 

Un/making can parallel the efforts of queer community archiving projects amid the tensions of institutional record-keeping systems. We propose that queer archival un/making, or "doing queer histories" through this continual spectrum between making and unmaking, engages a material form of working through these tensions: between working within existing systems and subverting or reconfiguring them.  

Participants un/make buttons using collage techniques and reproduced images, printed from the Queer Zine Archive Project’s (QZAP's) online database. Afterwards, participants can embed their collaged buttons with NFC (near field communication) tags and use our system to record oral histories into them, which they can later share with others by scanning the audio-enabled buttons with a smartphone.

Research activities

inviting collective reflections

We conducted a series of workshops where participants reflected on queer histories and explored queer identities by making buttons, embedded with personal oral histories. Buttons, much like T-shirts, flyers, or zines, are considered ephemera, and are central to queer records where traditional papers and archival materials are absent.

To create buttons, we invited participants to draw and use zines from the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP), cutting up and collaging fragments from these archival materials and reinterpreting them as their own. Doing so, our participants unmade or reconfigured zine materials using collaging practices, not to unmake a community archive, but to reflect on the nature of archives largely. 

After participants created their button designs, we embedded NFC (near field communication) tags inside of the button casings, which allowed participants to record their own oral histories into the buttons using a smartphone and our system, Queerios, adapted from Tolentino and Mosher’s Kurios platform for embedding audio in physical objects.

Participants sift through clippings from QZAP to use in collaging their buttons. Zines featured included: Queer Action Figures Volumes 1, 2, and 3; and Gendercide Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 5. 

A participant cuts out and collages an image, evocative of a comic book character, from the first volume of the Queer Action Figures zine, sharing reflections on the parallels between the figure in the image and her identity.

A diagram of how participants can create their own buttons using collage and drawing, embed an NFC tag into their button, scan their button using our web application, Queerios, and record their own audio. After recording audio and associating it with the button, scanning the button pulls up the audio for personal or social listening.

A participant taps their smartphone to their button to scan the NFC tag embedded inside and pulls up a webpage dedicated to that object entry. On the webpage, they can title their button and then record a snippet of audio. After recording and saving their audio, they or others can scan their button again to hear it played back.

A selection of various buttons that both participants and researchers (Allie Teixeira Riggs and Matthew Mosher) have made after participating in our workshops.

Contributions

design reflections

We contribute the following design reflections on queer archival un/making:

1. Un/making from queer perspectives encourages questioning, trying on, and exploring identities both personally and collectively;
2. Queer archival un/making can encompass sharing artifacts outside of research institutions to engage community archives and information activist practices;
3. Queer archival un/making invites reflections on what is missing from community archives and how un/making with historical materials can configure alternatives.

Our design reflections expand unmaking in HCI by looking to queer archives, paralleling the messiness through which queer identities and histories are made and interpreted.

Email   ariggs00@gmail.com

LinkedIn  atriggs

Google Scholar

ORCID