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Gabrielle Durepos and Amy Thurlow, "Archival Research in Historical Organisation Studies: Theorising Silences" (Emerald Publishing, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Amy Thurlow
The kid you hear playing the piano? He's not mine.
- [00:05]
Gabby Duropeau
On top of the two weekly piano lessons, I give my son Smarty Pants Vitamins to support his brain health.
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Amy Thurlow
And while I'm supposed to say it's.
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Gabby Duropeau
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- [00:31]
Amy Thurlow
I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowe's knows Sundays are for football.
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Gabby Duropeau
That's why we're here to help you get your next DIY project done. Even when the clock isn't on your side.
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Amy Thurlow
Whether that's a new Filtreat filter or.
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Gabby Duropeau
Bosch and Cobalt power tools, Lowe's has everything you need to feel like the MVP of diy. So get it done and earn your.
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Amy Thurlow
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Gabby Duropeau
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- [01:35]
Jen Hoyer
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer, and today I'm speaking with Gabby Duropeau and Amy Thurlow, authors of Archival Research in Historical Organization Studies, Theorizing Silences. Published by Emerald Publishing in February 2025, this book offers an accessible, theorized discussion of business archives that surfaces populations who've been marginalized by the archive. And I am so delighted today to be joined by both of the authors for a conversation about this book. So, Amy and Gabby, welcome to New Books Network. And before we dive into talking about your book, I would love if you both could introduce yourselves to listeners. Maybe if you can share a bit about your background and the work you're currently doing. Gabby, do you want to go first?
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Gabby Duropeau
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Jen, for inviting us to the session. We're thrilled to be able to talk about the book. It was really a labor of Love, I think Amy would agree. And like you said, well, my full name is Gabrielle Durpo. I'm a professor of Business administration at Mount Saint Vincent University. Everybody calls me Gabby. And my research, it's in the field of historical organization studies. And I say that with a lot of pride because when I started, when I finished my PhD or started my PhD, I guess there wasn't necessarily a field called historical organization studies. There was a field called business history, but they were doing a particular kind of research. And in the last 20 years or so, we've seen this rise of sort of a new field, historical org studies. What does it do? It brings together a lot of the rigorous academic research from history historiography and organization studies. And we've really done a lot of work in terms of trying to surface marginalized populations historically in organizations. And so for me, specifically, how have I contributed to this field? I've been long fascinated by methodology. For whatever reason, I try to step away from methodology, but I always get pulled back. I'm interested in the how. How do populations get marginalized? How is it that we write histories? What are the consequences for today? And I know, and I don't know why, but I do know I'm very much attracted to research settings that are in the glam sector. So galleries, libraries, archives and museums. And I think I'm attracted to those because I just, I love going there and hanging out there. I mean, and then if you can do research there, it looks like you're working, right? No, I mean, these organizations, I guess I've been doing some research on these organizations because I feel that they make their knowledge practices explicit. And then for me, what it's done is it allows me to be like, oh, that's how that's done. And it's kind of more explicit there. Can take those insights, go to organizations and understand how they produce knowledge every day, and they do it more implicitly. And it's always maybe a bit more covert, but you got to dig maybe a bit more, but it kind of allows me to see it. And then I can go and switch organizations and maybe try to understand how is knowledge produced and how does that impact us day to day. So that's me.
- [04:55]
Jen Hoyer
Fantastic. Thank you. Amy, do you want to go next?
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Amy Thurlow
Yes, thank you. So my background is in communication, public relations and communication, and I am a professor in the Department of Communication Studies here at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. And I came into sort of the history, the organizational history piece of it through my interest in critical sense making. So how Individuals and organizations find meaning in a complex communication environment. And I'm particularly interested in my research in the issue of identity construction. So how are identities constructed, communicated, conveyed? And I guess I'm always trying to answer the question, how come some narratives, some versions of the story stick, for lack of a better word, and others are lost or discounted or are never surfaced? So it's almost like putting together a puzzle to try and figure out now, why would this organization make these decisions and produce this identity? And I'm very interested in how individuals in organizations make sense of the communication they get from their organization and the broader society. So I've found. I don't know. I don't have the answer sometimes, but I've found steps along the way to answering that question. Both in traditional archives, where you can see the stories that were saved, preserved, or documented, and then in the spaces as Gabby was mentioning, you know, there's these silences where, where, you know, there are other stories or the fact they're not there is almost as loud as. As what you are finding. And I'm. I'm still trying to chip away at that question of, you know, how did that happen, that this narrative was preserved and this narrative wasn't? And yes, that's kind of how I got here.
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Jen Hoyer
Thanks so much. Yeah. And I really appreciated these perspectives that you're bringing to the conversation about archives. As someone who often just hears, I shouldn't say just hears archivists talking about archives, I really loved these other ideas coming into play in this conversation. So let's talk about your new book where you note in the introduction that it's important to understand that archives and their collections influence what knowledge can be produced in societies by governments and businesses. So I'm really curious to hear more about your own experience in the archive as researchers and if there's any archival research projects you've worked on that sparked your interest in this and your concern about archival silence and how you've seen archival collections really impact what knowledge is produced in the field you're working in. I don't know. Who wants to take that first?
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Gabby Duropeau
It's a fascinating question, and I will note that one of the comments I got in producing that when Amy and I were co writing this book, one of the comments I got, and I don't think I shared with Amy, was, but you're not an archivist. What do you. You're writing a book about archives. And I had to reflect on that because they're absolutely correct. We're. I mean, I'm A business professor, and Amy works in communication. But we use archives. We use them, and so we see where the gaps are. Because if you're trying to write a paper and there's no stories of women, you know, they were there, they had to be, but what is the impact they had and whatnot? So, yeah, so that's just the first point I want to make. But I think that one of the things I want to surface just by way of starting to answer this question is that there's different definitions of archives. There are, you know, collections of documents that are housed within walls. And that's more of, like, the traditional definition. But we've seen a big postmodern and textual turn where some researchers have said the archive is the entirety of society. It's everything that one society knows about a particular subject at a particular point in time. So it's much more discursive. And one of the things that Amy and I were really focused on in this book, but we ended a little bit on a different track, is we were concerned with the stuff that went in the walls, like what information is preserved with. But we also acknowledge that the definition of archives is obviously much broader. And I think it was a lot of it was, because we have done research at various archives, and Amy will share the archives that she's done research at. But I've been at the Otto Restroom Library in Miami, and that archive houses documents on Pan American Airways, the. The airline that is now not operating. I was also at the Tamit Library in New York. I've been at government archives, like the Nova Scotia Museum Archives. It's a provincial archive in Canada. Sorry. The Nova Scotia Museum Archives is a collection of documents specific to a museum. And then I was also at the Nova Scotia Archives, which is a provincial archive, as well as our Province House, which is a government. So I've done research at government sector organizations, and then also public sector organizations as well as private sector organizations. And, I mean, in frequenting those archives, we have to acknowledge they are absolute imperfect reflections of society. But I think there was a prevalence that if it's not in the archive, it didn't happen. And so I think that was one of the first myths we were trying to debunk, having used archives a lot. And it's just, as Amy was saying, it's long been amazing to me that so many populations are missing from archives, and in the ones that we've frequented. And I'll speak for myself, it's actually very difficult to find Indigenous voices as well as records about women and yeah, absolutely. I've seen how archival collections influence what knowledge is produced in our field. For example, when I was doing research at the PEN American Airways archive, I was looking at documents that had been published, like, in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And all of the pictures, these were like internal organs, so like internal newsletters. All of the pictures that depicted women did so in a way that glorified their body, their sexuality, the appeal. And in the captions, it would say something like beautiful so and so won the pageant of, you know. And then in the pictures that, where men were depicted, it was all about their business logic, their problem solving skills, and their incredible knowledge of machines, aviation. And what is the impact on society? When we reproduce these images over and over and over, we tend to buy into the narrative. It's kind of difficult to see it otherwise when one reality faces you every day. And so it imprints certain notions of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. And then we forget of maybe other ways. I mean, this is a glaring example. It's a glaring example, but it's definitely there. And then in those same newspaper internal newsletter articles at the Pan Am archive, during the Second World War, there was a big reversal. So, you know, during this time, like, you know, 40s, early 40s, there was this idea that, oh, my goodness, like, women are now going to be working on the shop floor cleaning Spark plus plugs. But we had to, like, reverse the perception that she would be celebrated for her beauty, but she was also able to do this work. So the captions would read, like, better than a man at cleaning Spark clubs. This Dorothy so. And so. So all of these. These captions really imprint a certain image of what it means to be man, what it means to a woman in a society at a particular point in time. And, I mean, that's the construction of gender happening right before our very eyes. And anytime we include details about that, we exclude a bunch of details. And we were interested in the exclusion in this book.
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Amy Thurlow
I mean, that was just really well said, Gabby. That's exactly where our focus was. And I think always coming back to the idea that archives are often understood in our society anyway as neutral. Neutral spaces, like these are just repositories of information. So as information's collected in sort of a neutral way, I mean, you can have access to it. But our perspective and our experience is that they're not neutral spaces. They're spaces that were constructed by humans. Even whether they were digital archives or physical spaces, decisions were made about, you know, how Many boxes could be included, and then if there were too many, which ones were not, you know, those choices were made based on individual sense making. So how individuals create meaning or understand things as meaningful based on their own experiences and backgrounds, and even in some ways the physical structure of the space determines those choices. So it's almost as if you need a filter when you go into an archive to remind yourself, you know, I'm looking at this particular history that's available to me from the documents that I'm reviewing. But all of those documents were chosen for me in or. Or for the user, you know, in. In some way based on some choices. And I guess in our book with the. What we're really looking at is how were those choices made? Or why were those choices made? Or even just kind of chipping away at that problem, or the problematic of the fact that you have to constantly remind yourself that you're dealing with information that was presented through sense making or choices or a process of making meaning that isn't necessarily your own, you know, it came to you from something else. So I've done some work in traditional archives. My research is, as I mentioned, really focused on identity construction. And to sort of dig into that, I look at organizations that have long histories and have impacted individuals through all kinds of different groups, employees, customers, all that sort of thing. And so I often find myself looking at railroads as that's kind of been a theme through my research. History and the study of railroads is fascinating. The archival material available on railroads is really interesting and it's. I feel like it's a microcosm like of the world and the archival world in that too. So I've done a lot of research in the New York Public Library archives, the Brook Astor Rare Books area, and they hold the Pennsylvania Railroad archives there. My research with railroads is mainly Canadian, the Canadian focus of Canadian National Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway, but both those railways emerged out of railways and mergers and pieces that were held in this Pennsylvania Railway collection. So you really do have to dig in to figure that out. And it's really interesting to see which narratives have been preserved. And I mean, there is a lot there. It goes way back. There's annual reports, there's documents that are like Gavi's describing. I mean, you're just in that space and the history around you, the, the pages that are aged and sort of the dust or mustiness of the. Is quite impressive. There's a lot there, but there's a lot not there too. And that becomes quite obvious when you're really digging into it. I've also done probably most of my research in archives has been with digital archives. So I've looked at corporate archives again for railways themselves or held by universities and other institutions. So that adds a whole different sort of layer in terms of how you engage with the material and how it comes to you, how you have access to it. So that's been very interesting. And I've worked with some other corporate archives of corporations in Canada, like Northern Telecom, which is a large telecommunication company, and you know, other organizations that have impact on employee groups or individual customers. So through that experience, I'm still working on that question of why are some stories, why do some narratives stick and are preserved in the railway situation? There's sort of two competing narratives in, in the Canadian experience that emerge, one being technology, progress, innovation, and the other one nation building. You know, focused on immigration, nation building and shoring up boundaries and all that sort of thing. But there is no dominant narrative for the people who weren't included in those stories, like the indigenous people who were so impacted by the railway going across western Canada in particular, or the laborers who did the work of building the railway. There's a kind of a complementary, I guess archival, I guess space of government narratives around the time that those two railways were emerging because we really had sort of these two major railways. They were both government supported and government funding. So if you dig into so Prime Minister's speeches and what was going on in the house, you get this story of it's our obligation to England, to Britain, right. The colonial impetus of it. But there are counter narratives. You can find pieces in newspapers of the time where there is an outcry about the money being spent and the political gain of individuals and sort of the resistance to it. Those pieces don't come together as a piece of our social fabric though. I mean, you have to dig for the stories and then paste them together. And I think was Gabby was saying, you know, it's not the traditional or expected story we make sense of in terms of what does the railway mean to, in this case, Canada. And so, yeah, that's, that's really what kept my interest in digging into that a little bit more.
- [19:52]
Gabby Duropeau
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- [19:57]
Jen Hoyer
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- [20:01]
Gabby Duropeau
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Amy Thurlow
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- [20:46]
Amy Thurlow
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- [20:52]
Jen Hoyer
So I want to talk a little bit more about. Yeah. Just how archival silences are created. And you outlined two frameworks in chapter two for theorizing archival silence. I think maybe we'll talk a little bit more about those in a moment and get into some examples. But also in chapter two, you list ways that archival silences are created and sustained. And so I was wondering if you could highlight a few of those ways that archival silences are created. And I'm curious if any of those stand out as especially prevalent in the areas that you're working in.
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Gabby Duropeau
Okay. Well, I can offer some examples of how archival silences are created in some ways. When you start making the list, you get surprised that there are actually archives to begin with because the, the silences and archives are. They're created at various moments of the historiographical operation. And Amy and I talk about this when we came up with the five Moments framework. But I want to talk about just some really pragmatic ways. I mean, I was in an archive and there was a piece of Scotch tape on a paper and it fell off and so did the letters behind it. So I couldn't read the document. You know, like the Scotch tape. I don't use Scotch tape in the same way anymore because it does lift sticky notes, lift the ink off the page. But then our archival silence is created. Sometimes documents are destroyed deliberately because there's no space in the archive. Sometimes they're destroyed through fire, sometimes they're destroyed because there's a secret. And, you know, the government wants to kind of get rid of. Get rid of the documents in that archive because they will be incriminated by them. But all of those notions are, they're such cultural phenomenon. So, for example, when it was okay to destroy like a lot of the documents in which is an example which I might give later. But a lot of the documents, for example, in some Canadian departments have been destroyed periodically because there was no space to house them. They just had to get rid of them in that moment in time. The cultural logic dictates that. Well, of course you have to destroy the documents because you don't have space and we don't have money to get a new archive. So the silences are caused not just by the actions, but by the cultural logic of the day, which dictates this is an okay thing to do. Of course you would do this. You have no. Like, there's no other choice, or this is horrible. You must preserve documents about indigeneity in Canada in 2015, because we're now in our society reconciling or trying to reconcile the fact that grave injustices were done to that population. So they happen everywhere for all sorts of reasons, some of which are pragmatic and some of which are just governed by that logic of the day that says, yeah, get rid of these things. And sometimes the silences are created before the archive is produced, meaning we don't write extensive records about women, or some women don't write about themselves. We don't preserve their diaries. So we don't have access to how they experience their day to day. But then sometimes, you know, archives are created because a bunch of past employees of an organization have a bunch of stuff about that organization. This is what happened at Pan American Airways. They just. The past employees got access to a warehouse and they started bringing in all of their paraphernalia of Pan American Airways newsletters. So it was past employees and families of past employees. They were like, we don't want to throw this out. You know, a group of researchers could benefit from this collection. And it all landed in a warehouse. But who knows what got thrown out along the way? And who knows when the archivists at the Otto Richer Library took over the collection, what did they throw out and what did they keep? Because they're documenting and keeping according to their own archival conventions, which are very specific to a time and place and to a geographical area. So silences happen in all of these areas. And sometimes I'm amazed that we even have documents in the archives to look at.
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Jen Hoyer
Thank you for those examples.
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Amy Thurlow
Yeah, that was a great point, Gabby, because it's, you know, it's not the intentionality, like, it's not an intentional silencing. It's a product of a series of decisions that were made based on, you know, multiple factors of the time. I'm thinking of one example we have in the book, but just this idea of scent in the archive, right? The smell, the being in the archive. And one of the examples we have is when materials are digitized, you lose some things, right? You lose. We talk about notes in the margin and things like that. And there has been work to sort of, like, mitigate that or compensate for that. But one of the things that has been debated is the smell. Do you get the scent of the pages, like, which conveys something to you. And when you think about sense making, you know, at that level of thinking, like, there's just sort of. That what I described, you know, in the. In the archives with the railway, you get that feeling like, okay, there's a great deal of age here. These things must be really important to have been saved so carefully all this time, right? That comes to you just instinctively through the scent and the visual, the nature. And of course, in a digital system, you don't feel and see and smell that. And one of the examples of the book, in the book was that some of the records in that case of a cholera epidemic that had happened long, long ago had this scent of vinegar in them because while the records were being kept, vinegar had been a treatment of cholera at the time. And the physician who was keeping the records, like, you could tell on the pages where the treatments, you know, he's writing active treatments or whatever, you can get that sent. And so for a while there, there's a debate in the literature and people are saying, yes, but I mean, of course that's lost. I mean, digitally, you know, but we can do that. There are technologies available that can digitize scent. And it could be the archive, could be construct it in a way that scent is factored in. It was a choice right when the archive was built. So should it be PDF, Is it searchable? Blah, blah, blah. Can you smell the pages? But nobody asked that question, or it was cost prohibited or whatever. Some barriers, you know. So I think sort of just like pulling the threads on what. First acknowledging there were decisions, I think is an important thing. Then acknowledging that factors impacted how those decisions were made and that every one of those decisions probably resulted in a preservation decision or a discard decision by the nature of sorting, right? That's the nature of how it works. So I think one of our. I don't say messages. I don't know if that's the word, but something that definitely we talked a lot about working on the book was the idea that in order to understand the choices you're making, you have to answer the question. You know, people are thinking when they're building the archive, what's most important? In my limited space, with my limited budget. And that question itself is subjective. The answer has to be subjective. And I think the challenges are not necessarily that it is subjective, because it is, but it's acknowledging that that's the process that we're in.
- [28:51]
Jen Hoyer
And I promised that we would talk about some of the frameworks that you use for examining all of this. And so I want to talk first about the Five Moments Framework, which you developed for understanding archival science. Sorry, archival silence. So could you describe that framework for listeners and then give examples from one of the case studies that you talk about in the book?
- [29:15]
Gabby Duropeau
Yeah, absolutely. I can talk about the. So in the book, we do present two frameworks. One is the Five Moments Framework, and one is a critical sense making framework. And I can speak to one maybe. And maybe Amy can take the lead to speaking about the Critical sense making framework. I think that part of the richness of this book is the fact that we offer the two frameworks, because I think in saying that we are saying we have to just be more reflexive about how we use, how we use archives and how archives come to be. And I think we were also trying to say there's a lot of ways you can be reflexive. Here's one way that we came up with, but really, you could probably use any of your preferred methodology and infuse a lot of reflexivity in it. So it was nice to bring the critical sense Making framework. And this one is a framework that Amy has worked on developing quite a bit. But I'll just speak to the Five Moments Framework now. So this one is one that Amy and I came up with on our own, and it was. We developed it as one possible way to understand how silences are perpetuated. And also, where do they come from? Like, where do you have to look for them? And of course, it's not fully inclusive, but our hope is that, again, that researchers can benefit from this just in terms of being more reflexive. So the Five Moments Framework is made up of five moments that inform the historiographical operation. So in the first moment, we look at the moment that a source is made, some document gets written at a particular point in time using the social conventions of that day. We looked at the moment of making the archive, the moment of collecting archival sources, the moment where researchers like Amy and I actually write history. We pull documents, leave other documents aside, and we write a history. And then we also looked at the moment of constructing the profession as a way of hinting to the archive beyond the four walls, in the sense that when we write a piece of research like our book, it's going to go. This is now part of the archive of society, of collectively what we know about that particular subject. So we thought the Moment of constructing the profession was important because it puts a lot of limits. The professions put a lot of limits on what's important and what you should be researching and what you shouldn't do. You should get back to work, Abby. Kind of thing. So then we thought, okay, so at each of these moments, we thought we should give some guidelines to researchers by way of questions. So when you're talking or you're thinking about the moment the source is made versus the moment of making the archive. So at each of the five moments, we thought we should present some questions that researchers could engage with. So one of those questions is, when you're looking at the document, who's in the document? Who's present, who's represented, who's missing? So who's actually there? Who's speaking on behalf of that person? And then who isn't there at all? So you don't see mention of them or you don't see their images. And as a second question to ask at each of these moments, we thought, well, which social categories are present? Are the documents speaking about a man, a woman, an indigenous person? The list goes on. Then we thought a third question would be, okay, thinking about social categories, are there actual systems of inequity that are present? So you're thinking about, are women present, but are they presented in a very sexist way? Or are indigenous persons presented, and are they seen through a colonial lens? So the systems of inequity really speak to racism, colonialism, ableism, and whatnot. And then the fourth question is, okay, we look at this whole representation in this document. Who benefits from this depiction, this narrative, and who is marginalized? Like, who kind of loses in this equation? And then we use that to ask, okay, is there silence? And if so, how. How can we expose it? So, for example, I was giving the. The example of. Of women at Pan Am. And if we look at. If we look at. We ask those five questions at the moment the source is made of the women working at Pan AM in the 50s and the 60s, you know, how do we expose silences? Well, these women were celebrated for their beauty, but surely they did more than look beautiful all day. I'm sure they were qualified stewardesses, airline attendants, or, you know, some other. Whatever job that they did. So, you know, there's definitely a silence there. And so. But I want to put them. Put that story on pause for a second. I want to give you an example of how we use the five moments framework in the book. And I'll focus on chapter three, where we talk about Indigeneity and specifically the Indigenous population in Canada. And we really anchored. We use the Five Moments framework to focus on a particular situation or a commission, a government sponsored commission, which is the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. So the TRC, as I'll call it as the acronym, it worked to explore and document the legacy of the Indian residential school system. And I won't dive into a history of that so much, but I want to talk a little bit about how can the Five Moments Framework help us understand the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? So the TRC explored the Indian residential school system. And this system operated in Canada from 1831 to 1996. And there was a lot of trauma, like an extreme amount of trauma that happened in the irs. Some of it was sexual, some of it was a deprivation of food, so on and so forth, labor, whatnot. And a lot of Indigenous of our Indigenous youth actually died in these schools. And so what the Truth and Reconciliation did, it was part of a bigger initiative to actually to expose the issue and help Canadians on their path to reconciliation. But to do that, the TRC had to collect documentation because there wasn't a lot of information available on the Indigenous population. Because, of course, there were some populations in Canada that were worth documenting and others that were so marginalized that even documenting them didn't happen. So a big part of the TRC was, we need information. So as part of this, as part of the commission, the TRC led to the creation of documents of both the Indian residential school system and the Indigenous populations that attended the schools, because they recognized early on that there were few documents that existed. So this is an example of the moment the source is made. Few sources were made of this population. And the sources that were made were very rarely from an Indigenous perspective. They were made about that population. So we're not getting access to the first person voice. And luckily, Amy found this amazing book by an author, last name is Griffiths, who basically surfaces newspapers from the Indigenous residential school system, where the students actually wrote newspaper articles. But even then there was questions around, well, were they being censored and were they being advised on what to write, what was appropriate to write as part of the path of colonization? So, number one, not a lot of sources. So the TRC recognizes, okay, so if we want to kind of get on our path of reconciliation, we need to make an archive. You know, we need to amass documents. And so the TRC started doing this. So the TRC undertook its work from 2008 to 2015. They held national events, you know, all across Canada, massive ceremonies. They did a lot of statement gathering as part of inviting indigenous persons who had were previous students at the Indian Residential School system and invited them to give their statements. But again, given the high mortality rate at the Indian Residential School and given the extreme trauma, individuals were either not there to present their story because they passed, or silence was a preferred mode, a comfort, A comfort, an act of self preservation for them. And so this really opened, I think, Amy and I, in my, in my eyes, around how silence itself is a very cultural specific term. Sometimes some communities prefer silence. Silence isn't a bad thing. It has its connotations depending on the situation in which it comes up. In moment three, we look at the moment of collecting archival sources. So to do its work, the TRC had tried to collect existing documents, but they met so many challenges. They early on had a court case with Library Archives of Canada. Library Archives of Canada is an amazing organization, but they didn't have the amount of people on staff to manipulate all the documents and get them ready to be shipped as part of the trc. I mean, there were just budget issues, time issues, logistical issues that happen every day in organizations. Archives are organizations as much as they are preservers of our, of our documents. They had to challenge the Ontario Provincial Police, who had relevant documents in one situation but wouldn't turn them over because of their own rules around maintaining privacy. The TRC also had to access files from an independent assessment process, which was part of a bigger push to reconcile. So there's a bigger initiative. And as part of the big initiative, the TRC was one outcome of five, but other efforts had been done. But the two parts, like the various efforts as part of the big collective effort to reconcile the parts, were not necessarily speaking to each other in sharing documents because some of the individuals who had taken part in fact gathering and statement sharing had signed an agreement that their stories wouldn't be shared publicly. I mean, this is their personal childhood trauma. And so there was trouble sharing documents, even though both efforts were dedicated to reconciling in Canada. And then some of the documents weren't available. So the Indian Affairs Department, for example, in Canada went through three big calls. One in 1934, 1936 and 1954, where they just didn't have space. They just got rid of a bunch of, of documents. So anyway, in looking at the five moments framework, we ask at different parts of doing a history as different parts of the historiographical operation, who's there, who isn't, and why, like where the documents go and it kind of gives us a framework to guide our thought process. And so I'll leave that there for now.
- [40:28]
Jen Hoyer
Thank you. That was such a thorough kind of overview of how that framework works. Amy, I don't know if you want to add anything about that framework or maybe we move on to talking about the next one. What do you think?
- [40:43]
Amy Thurlow
Sure, we can probably move on to the critical sense making, although I will just say as well, because we dedicated one chapter to critical sense making and the other. But I think it's important to. To just point out that the Five Moments framework is really a process that could be applied to any engagement with archival materials. And I think, you know, as a broader research process too. And it gets back to that idea of process, right, like understanding when and actually that decisions are being made. I feel like that's a really important piece of that puzzle.
- [41:26]
Gabby Duropeau
Your teen adjective used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist. The new fragrance by Miu Miu defined by you this episode is brought to.
- [41:57]
Amy Thurlow
You by State Farm.
- [41:58]
Gabby Duropeau
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- [42:15]
Amy Thurlow
Like a good neighbor.
- [42:16]
Gabby Duropeau
State Farm is there.
- [42:20]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, definitely. And I found it interesting that moving on to talking about critical sense making, the case study you applied that to in your book is digital archive. But of course these things can be used across different types of archives. But I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about some of the characteristics of digital archives that maybe do make them a bit different difference to analyze. With respect to silences, we've already talked about odor and I'm just. I'd love to hear you talk about how critical sense making works as a framework to shed light on the issues that we find there.
- [42:58]
Amy Thurlow
Sure. Yes. Thank you. I think one of the reasons critical sense making works well with digital archives is because one of the defining differences is that your interaction is with a digital framework, with technology, not with a human being. Right. So most like in person archives, you're going to talk to an archivist and order documents or be Supervised as you have access to the materials, or at least engage with a person who knows the inventory of the archive in a way that you can talk through what your research needs are. So in the case of digital archives, the interaction is seen as more technology based. But I think why we thought critical sense making was such a good fit there is because we have to remember that there are humans behind all of that technology. So once again, I feel like I've said this before, but like the decisions of what technology, how it works, what you have access to, but even like the shape or colors frame on your computer screen when you're accessing the archival database, you know, all those design decisions were part of human interaction. So you're still responding to that same, same kind of, I don't know, juggernaut, if that's the word, you know, where somebody is answering the question what is important? And that is subjective. So we tend to look at digital archives as somehow less subjective, like more, more neutral, more science, or however you want to frame that. So we thought critical sense making might be a good foil, if you will, or lens to look through that, because critical sense making is a framework that is really aimed at trying to figure out how things become meaningful to individuals and groups in society. So when you're faced with this technology based archive, how do you interpret things differently, for example? So critical sense making is a framework that starts with Carl Weich's sense making properties. So his research on sense making in organizations told us that there are seven psychosocial properties that humans go through when they're making sense of something. And those properties include identity construction, which is arguably seen as like one of the most important components in that mix, plausibility, which is to say people will find an answer or an idea resonates with them if they agree it's plausible, it doesn't necessarily have to be accurate. Right. So accuracy isn't a factor in the decision, the extraction of cues from a complex environment. We get so many messages every day, all the time, about ideas in society and ourselves. And how do you pull out the ones you're going to pay attention to? So cues, retrospection, it's all, it's all done in a retrospective manner. So your previous experience influences how you make sense of the next thing, the next item, idea, incident, whatever that you have to deal with. It's social, so it happens amongst humans, which is why the digital archive is such an interesting place, because that social sense making is still happening. You just can't see the people and they might not even be in the system anymore, but their decisions, their interactions, their designs are a social interaction that you're still having through the technology and then the last two enactment. So Wike is famous, you know, for saying, you know, something along the lines of we don't know what we think until we hear what we say. So he was a believer that until we enact meaning, like write it, speak it, take action on it, then we don't fully know for ourselves what it is we believe about that. And then the final one is it's ongoing in nature, so it's continuously happening. We're continuously making sense of things. And so as things change around us or as we get experience being trained in archives, a certain way, that influences how we make sense of archives in future. Right, so that was a long list. But basically the gist of it is all these processes happen whenever we face something that's out of the routine. Right? So our brains are always looking for shortcuts, and they try and create routines that make it easier for us to move through the world quickly and easily. So if a story is presented, a narrative is presented as important and it's plausible to us, and it's easier for us to just research that story, then we might make sense of that as meaningful and focus on that and not the pieces that aren't easily delivered to us. So in the critical sense making piece, we take those processes, Wike's seven psychosocial properties, and we put them in a broader context that includes power. So, I mean, yes, there might be decisions, unconscious or conscious, about how something is presented, but likely it's influenced by power in a couple of ways. One could be discursive power, like what the world tells us is important. You know, from how we're raised, what our families taught us, what we see leaders doing, what we see our peers doing, all those things, and also societal or organizational rules. So if the rules of research say that you need to be able to access certain kinds of information in certain ways, then that's going to impact the way that we answer the question, what is important? Because we're looking for what we've been trained to look for. So I guess from the digital archive perspective, what we really wanted to emphasize was as you go through those process, those seven psychosocial processes, and then you think about power, to Gabby's point, like, who benefits from this decision? Who is excluded from this decision? It really makes you dig into the. Not just the structure of the digital archive, but the interaction. So how was this decision made? How am I responding to this decision, how would I, you know, ask differently for material if I had a different context? And I'll just give one example of sort of the, of this inaction would be the transformation of research over the last couple of decades around keyword search versus, you know, browsing, I'll say, or shelf browsing research or whatever. So keyword search, Boolean search indicators, and now we're at the point where, you know, large language models, you can use conversational, but you have to direct the ask, right? So in keyword searching, not only did you have to conform to keywords that had been tagged, right. Like they had to be important enough to be, but you were also isolated from what else was on the shelf. I'll put that in postmodern quotes for you. You couldn't see what else was of interest or related or next to or whatever. You could just get the slice you needed. So now in some digital archives, you can do a virtual browse, but you still have to ask for the parameters of what you can be shown, as opposed to wandering through the space. So it feels a little bit different. And it's, of course, digital archives much more accessible now with conversational language prompts as opposed to Boolean. At the same time, you have to almost anticipate who on the other end, at whatever point created the infrastructure that allows that response to happen. So how is it being trained? How is it being focused? And all of those things were, were human interactions based on subjective decision making because, you know, it's retrospective, it's individual, it's based on our experience, it's based on our identity as a researcher and an archivist. You know, what would a researcher be looking for in this situation? And how I answer that question is going to really impact what I ask for, how I ask for it, and how I re. How I engage with it once it's provided. Yeah, absolutely.
- [52:23]
Jen Hoyer
And so then your final chapter in the book offers a five point agenda for researchers who are working in archives. I'd love if you could share some of those points and more importantly, maybe how you hope that agenda will change the way that research and scholarship are happening.
- [52:40]
Gabby Duropeau
Yeah, absolutely. I can speak to some of the points. I'll speak maybe to the first three, and then maybe Amy can help help me out and speak to the last two. Those are very much her areas of expertise. Yeah, so in the final chapter, we do offer a five point agenda. One of the points is on promoting reflexivity. One is about exploring and acknowledging the archive beyond walls. One is about aesthetics and how aesthetics can help us identify silences. And then the last two include using an intersectional lens as well as, you know, let's bring it back to business and teaching. How can we use these, these different frameworks to help decolonize the business curriculum? So the, the Five Moments framework and Carl Weich's work and Amy's work on critical sense making is very much about promoting reflexivity. And so when we were thinking about the conceptual frameworks that we would offer in this book, they were frameworks intended to encourage people to be reflexive. And so reflexivity is very much defined as exploring the role of the self, myself as a researcher, and the impact that I have on the research. So gone are the days where we suggest that gone should be the days where researchers offer a neutral, sort of God's view perspective. They're documenting everything as it happened. And their role in the research process and on the research process doesn't impact the research. So we're trying to discourage that view in saying your role as a researcher very much impacts the outcome of the research. And so it is important for us to explore what we take for granted every day, what we consider to be normal, and ask, how are our thought processes on a particular thing like archives, how are they constructed day to day? So we can't just think, oh, what did I find? I need to engage not just in first order thought, where I think I need to engage in second order thought. If I'm being reflexive and think about how I think, how is my thought pattern orchestrated and composed daily, and where did that come from? And that's a really good way of trying to identify the silences that we might be creating in our way when we engage in our research. Because moving to the second point, the research we create, as I was saying earlier, leads to building the archive beyond walls. We're creating our archive every day, every day. The things that we do, the documents that we write, those might be kept, they might be discarded, but we contribute to the particular notion of a thing. Like, how do we make sense of that thing? How does it become plausible to speak to Amy's points about sense making? So we want to explore not just the archive in the four walls, but we want to now maybe help or encourage researchers to go beyond the four walls to look for silences that exist within our society, to identify how those are perpetuated and how can we be better at giving, you know, people a voice if they want it, you know, and then in terms of aesthetics here, we're concerned with the role of our sensory realm in the research process. I'm just going to give a quick story. A while ago I was doing research on museums and I got to the museum, Fisherman's Life Museum in Jador, Oysterfahn, and they were, the heritage interpreters, were baking molasses cookies on the wood stove because that's, that's what they used to do in the Myers house in this inshore fishing community. And the smell, the smell was incredibly powerful. It was big part of the story. You come home and there's this smell in your cold from, you know, being in those small dory boats and whatnot. But what role does that play? You know, the. What you can touch. What role does that play? Especially when we're talking about strict divisions of labor. And I keep coming back to gender, but when women are very much doing domestic labor, men are doing paid labor. Well, if the domestic labor wasn't well documented, how can we use aesthetics to get information around the day to day lives of the work that women did? Whether it was paid or not paid, it's work. So we're interested in work. Okay, I'll leave it there and I'll let Amy continue, if that's okay.
- [57:04]
Amy Thurlow
So I'll go to point number four, which is intersectionality. And I mean, this just sort of wraps up some of the other themes we were talking about about the story is it's broader and the context is so important. And sometimes the way we interact with archives can limit the exposure. We get to the context for all the very reasons that we've talked about already today. So the intersectional approach is that we all have intersectional identities. We're all, you know, multidimensional people. We're not just, I'm not just a woman, you know, or I'm not just a demographic, I'm not just a professor. So I have all these intersecting pieces and those create identity with me. That's how I construct my identity and how we collectively, as individuals in organizations, create our identity. So when we're looking at archival research, it really has to take context into account and look at social and demographic factors that influence the sense making or the decisions that are happening at any of the five points, you know, through the process. So examples like gender, class, race, sexuality, geography, age, ability, you know, all those elements contribute to the way we make decisions and the way we interact with information. And sometimes the very structure or function of the archive can limit our access to that by, you know, I could be searching for women in railroads or whatever and I might get information on that perspective. But I don't know if I'm talking about, like, women are not a homogeneous group of respondents and they all have different intersecting identities that could influence how they actually experience the story that I'm learning about or the narrative of how they were involved. So taking an intersectional lens to archives, and certainly that's something that's happening more and more, and researchers are aware of that, but that the need to broaden that context has to influence everything from the physical structure to the interface to the design to everything, including what's preserved and what's discarded. So that was our point number four. And then our final point talks about decolonizing the business curriculum because, you know, from the business organizational history perspective and kind of the broader business school, what is preserved in the archive is very closely related to what is being taught in the business curriculum. Like, it's not that archives are sort of behind this closed door. And it's interesting to dig into if you happen to be a researcher. It has an actual implication in the world. You know, it informs and it propels. And so what's being taught in business curriculum is what was the answer to that? What is really important question in the archives that we keep talking about? So it's a complicated issue because decolonizing the business curriculum, which relies on information that's preserved in archives, so therefore must also be decolonized or is. It's more complicated than just saying, okay, we're going to ask different questions. I mean, yes, that's part of it, but a lot of the material was produced through colonial processes. So I mean, you can't just let go of everything in the archive. As Gabby pointed out in her example, you have to acknowledge what's there, but you also have to think about how it was produced and for whom and by whom, and ask questions about who benefits and who doesn't. So the other piece of that puzzle is, and we talked a little bit about it, is corporate archives. So business curriculum also relies heavily on organizations keeping their own archives. And Gabby pointed out there, I mean, to whose benefit or who decided what was important for that, for that corporation? The other thing is corporate archives are often, the content is often largely determined by what's legally required for reporting in that sector or jurisdiction. That changes over time and it often doesn't include the social information or factors that would give you an intersectional perspective. So that's a challenge. And the other thing is space and money. To maintain those archives is a challenge in corporate archives. So you don't always get the long term maintenance of A narrative, you get like snapshots in time of a narrative. And it's important to acknowledge that that's what you're looking at, first of all. But I think we really do, as a discipline, have to think about how do we want to preserve narratives and, you know, respect the experiences and the sense making and the meaning constructed in those archives as well.
- [62:29]
Jen Hoyer
Thank you. It's an exciting agenda, honestly, an exciting list of things to ask of folks. And I know I've taken a lot of your time, but before we wrap up, I just want to give you space to share about anything, anything else you're working on next that you want to talk about. I don't know if there's any related projects that are emerging out of this book specifically, or other totally different and new projects you're turning to now that this has wrapped up. Gabby, do you want to go first?
- [62:56]
Amy Thurlow
Absolutely.
- [62:58]
Gabby Duropeau
Well, I'm currently working on an organizational history of a museum. It's a provincial museum complex called the Nova Scotia Museum. And I'm looking at how it commemorates industry in the province. So the stories that it tells about industry in Nova Scotia. And I'm looking at mines and mills and the fisheries sector and all kinds of stories around the industries that were like, once prominent, maybe still are prominent in Nova Scotia. But I will say the archival research and historical organization studies has had a profound impact on me. Archival research is fun and it's addictive. So if you are interested, if listeners are interested in diving in, I would encourage them to do it because it's just a lot of fun and again, a little bit addictive. And so here I am now sifting through mountains of documents and looking at notes in the margins and looking for stories. But one last story I'll share just before I close off, I conclude, is this book has had quite an impact on my thought process. My PhD supervisor and a close colleague of Amy's, his name is Albert Mills, he always said, oh, Gabby, if you don't know about something, just write a book. And I'm like, but I thought it was the experts that wrote the book. I thought you had to know a lot about something to write a book. But he's like, oh, no, that's how you learn. This is a very pragmatic thing. You just write the book and at the end you're going to know a lot about that subject. And surely you, Amy and I know more about silences and how they're perpetuated in a society now than we did before we started. But the only problem with that is you can't take the lens off. So right now I'm working on this organizational history of Nova Scotia and I was doing the chapter on mills and there's two mills in Nova Scotia that are woolen. Two, sorry, two museums in Nova Scotia that commemorate mills, textile mills. And there's a whole story in the documents about curators at the Nova Scotia Museum trying to find more information about the women who worked at the textile mills. They know that women work there. They have one picture of them and there's like 10 years of this one curator's life dedicated to like, who were the women, what did they wear? And all they can find through interviews with the men who worked at the mine is they were looking for girls who worked like a man and some of them lost their fingers because they get them stuck in the machine. And I'm thinking, wow, that's all we know. We know so much about the Millers, like where they sat. They played chess with like the young boys in the community. It was like kind of a social vibrant place. We know all kinds of stuff. Not a whole lot about the women. And to be quite honest, you might wonder, how is this related to our conversation? But I think it's a really good example of intersectionality because we are all, as researchers, you know, I was going to write a story about mills and machines and millers, and it was going to be men and machines. But we have to look at what isn't there. And I get obsessed with what isn't there. And often it's always at the intersection of men, machine, gender, woman. There's all kinds of stories at the intersections of various social categories. So that's what I'm working on.
- [66:22]
Jen Hoyer
That sounds exciting. Hear me.
- [66:24]
Amy Thurlow
And I have to agree. Just this book in particular, I think it had a real significant impact on how I do research also going forward. And I mean, just your example there about if you want to know, if you want to learn about something, write a book, is that's a perfect example of the sense making property of enactment.
- [66:45]
Gabby Duropeau
Right.
- [66:46]
Amy Thurlow
The action of creating it solidifies and clarifies what you think. So for me, absolutely, that was a huge piece of it. And of course, I'm really grateful to Gabby for inviting me to join her to write this book. I learned so much from Gebbie through this process that's really. I'm really able to bring to the other research I'm doing and I'm really grateful for that. Currently I'm working on a research handbook on organizational sense making with my co editors were pulling together stories of people who are using sense making in organizations, challenges with it, applications of it, and then also, you know, sort of it's not really a how to manual, but there's some examples of if you want to use it, you know, what it might look like in different contexts. And I guess context is the word because we're giving a global perspective of how it's used in different regions and sectors and that sort of thing. So we're in the middle of that now, so it feels like a little bit of a whirlwind of work happening there. But I'm really excited about having that all together in one place and I think that'll work out really well. So that's my focus right now.
- [68:03]
Jen Hoyer
Thank you so much and thank you both Amy and Gabby once again. I've been speaking today with Gabby Giropo and Naomi Thurlow, authors of archival research and historical organization studies Theorizing Silences, published by Emerald Publishing in February 2025. My name is Jen Hoyer and you've been listening to new books.
- [68:38]
Amy Thurlow
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four litre jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
- [68:49]
Jen Hoyer
Oh, come on.
- [68:50]
Gabby Duropeau
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate.
- [68:54]
Amy Thurlow
On all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever.
- [69:00]
Gabby Duropeau
You were made to outdo your holidays.
- [69:03]
Amy Thurlow
We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.