Archival issues: methodological reflections within the contextof academic production in the field of the humanities

Abstract

This dossier proposes a methodological and epistemological reflection on the archive in the humanities. Born from a persistent observation in the teaching of research methodology, it approaches the archive not as a mere repository of sources but as an operative category that condenses tensions between tradition and creation, canon and heterogeneity, epistemic authority and critical dimension. The three articles gathered here explore, from different perspectives, the ways in which the archive configures the contours of the thinkable: the pedagogy of silence and the operations that render legible the gaps of the corpus; the production of inexistent archives through generative artificial intelligence as a xenofeminist political gesture; and the methodological problems and decisions raised by a fragmentary and unpublished epistolary archive. Together, the works collected here maintain that interrogating the archive means problematizing the conditions of knowledge production, and that every methodology is, in this sense, a political position.