Records, Subjects and Agents: Exploring Archives of Popular Music through Critical Archival Studies

This chapter examines how methods and theories drawn from critical archival studies – which “builds a critical stance regarding the role of archives in the production of knowledge and different types of narratives, as well as identity construction” (Caswell, Punzalan and Sangwand, 2017, p. 2) – can be applied to studies of popular music archives in Information Studies and allied fields (e.g. Heritage Studies, Museum Studies). The chapter introduces key ideas from this framework, before exploring how these can be embedded within methodologies for the study of popular music heritage in three themed sections – archival sources, subjects of the record, and archival agents.