2026 ALISE Annual Conference

This study presents a preliminary critical review of scholarship on archives and affect. Drawing on database searches, manual journal searches, and citation tracking, it analyzes 53 publications that engage affective concepts such as emotion, trauma, care, empathy, and emotional labor. Preliminary findings identify several major areas of discussion: conceptual uses of affect in archival studies; care, radical empathy, and archival ethics; trauma, harm, and reparative practice; person-centered recordkeeping and archival agency; and emotional labor and archivist wellbeing. By mapping these areas, the study clarifies how affect has become an important vocabulary for rethinking archival relationships, responsibilities, and forms of labor.