Ethics of Researching the Archive

In archival research, ethical questions of consent, anonymity, power relations and representation are typically absent. In this episode, Dr Sneha Krishnan draws from  extensive experience working with colonial-era archives on gender and childhood in India. Sneha sheds light on how the archive does not in fact consist of ‘dead material’ and warrants the rigor, consideration and reflection that any qualitative research entails, particularly as archives are often sites of ongoing imperialist violence but not widely viewed as such. 

Dr. Sneha Krishnan is associate professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. As a cultural and historical geographer, Sneha is interested in gender and childhood in postcolonial contexts. Her doctoral research used ethnographic and historical research to focus on the spatialities of risk and safety in the lives of young middle-class women in the South Indian city of Chennai. Building on this, her monograph-in-progress examines hostels for women in historical context as sites where imperial logics endure into the postcolonial present. 

Recommended Reading:

• Krishnan, S. (2025). Stories with horns and tails. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0(0).
• https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/