Trevor Owens

I’m excited to be able to share the first four chapters of my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory with you for input and comments. For more background on the project, you can read the full book proposal for it here.

Like I did with my pervious book, I am posting draft chapters for input from the broader community of memory workers. Each chapter is up in a google doc for anyone to suggest edits on or offer inline comments. Below are links to each chapter.

• Chapter 1: A Future for Cultural Memory
• Chapter 2: What Disruption Wants
• Chapter 3: Where Data Drives
• Chapter 4: Why Memory Work Doesn’t Work

These are very much in progress drafts. So, I’m interested in any and all feedback and input. I’m interested in any feedback that can help strengthen the project, but I’m also interested in hearing about any parts of it that particularly resonate with readers. To that end, if there are parts that resonate with you feel free to screenshot them and share them on social media and or to add comments attesting to things that you think work well in the chapters. If you do share out about this on twitter please tag me @tjowens. Along with that, I’m particularly interested in any suggestions for work that I should be citing from women, people of color, and early career professionals. I’m also interested for any more scholarship written by memory workers (archivists, librarians, curators, etc.) that I should focus more attention on.

For the next 3-4 months, I’m planning to shift to work on the last four chapters, the ones that focus on Maintenance, Care, and Repair. At that point I will post those chapters and shift to work through revising and improving these first four chapters based on input I’ve received.

If you do provide input on any of the drafts and you would like to be acknowledged for that in the final book, please list your name at the bottom of any of the chapters you provide input on so that I can make sure you get added to the acknowledgements list.

If it’s useful, you are welcome to cite these draft chapters, but when doing so cite them as something like Trevor Owens.(forthcoming). After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.