Cifor and Gilliland argue that archives cannot be understood as neutral repositories of evidence, since records, archival spaces, absences, and acts of retrieval generate powerful affective responses that shape memory, identity, justice, and scholarly interpretation. Their introduction situates archival studies within the broader affective turn, where emotions, feelings, and bodily responses are treated not as secondary disturbances to knowledge, but as legitimate objects of critical inquiry. This perspective challenges the profession’s inherited attachment to objectivity by asking how archives provoke sadness, trust, anger, trauma, hope, longing, or recognition in those who encounter them. The archive, in this sense, is not only a place where the past is stored; it is a charged field where personal and collective lives are reactivated. The special issue they introduce develops this claim through cases involving LGBTQ, feminist, human rights, post-genocide, diaspora, and institutional-care archives, demonstrating that records may restore continuity for displaced communities, intensify pain for survivors, or enable marginalised subjects to recognise themselves within history. Particularly significant is the attention given to absence: missing, destroyed, or unattainable records can produce their own emotional force, generating what the authors describe through concepts such as imagined records and impossible archival imaginaries. The case of genocide survivors and displaced Bosnian communities is especially revealing, since records become instruments of mourning, identity reconstruction, truth-finding, and social healing. Ultimately, Cifor and Gilliland insist that affect is not peripheral to archival practice but constitutive of it: to archive is to mediate between evidence and emotion, bureaucracy and embodiment, memory and justice.
