About us

‘το αρχείο/the archive’ project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities researchers, social scientists, computer scientists and action researchers, exploring the possibilities of experimenting with creative, multimodal, digital and publics-creating methodologies to document social change and to co-create history from below with various communities.

A first (incomplete) experiment in live, public archiving is a database of the literature on ‘the Greek crisis’.

to archeio/το αρχείο project was set up in August 2017 as a collaboration between Christos Varvantakis (Goldsmiths), Melissa Nolas (Goldsmiths), and Marina Apgar (IDS).

Further information about the project and its activities to follow in due course.

Christos Varvantakis has a background in social anthropology and sociology and is currently working at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research areas include: childhood, politics, activism, contested urban spaces as well as qualitative, visual and multimodal research methodologies. He co-directs the Childhood Publics research programme and is the co-editor of entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography, and the head of programming of Ethnofest, the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival.

Melissa Nolas is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on: childhood, youth, and family lives; civic and political practices across the life course; human agency and lived experience; multimodal ethnography; publics creating methodologies. She co-directs the Childhood Publics research programme and is the co-editor of entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. She was the PI for the European Research Council funded Connectors Study (2014-2019).

Marina Apgar is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Inclusion and Social Change research cluster at the Institute of Development Studies. Marina has 20 years’ experience working directly with marginalised communities in international development across the research-practice divide supporting locally defined development pathways. As a human ecologist and scholar activist she uses systemic and participatory action research to build understanding of transformative change in social-ecological systems with a view to accelerating more equitable and sustainable development outcomes and impact. She is associate editor of the journal of Action Research, a core member of the ESRC STEPS Center, and is leading the Participatory Monitoring Evaluation and Learning system for the DFID funded and IDS led consortium on Tackling Drivers of Child Labour programme.

Aspa Chalkidou is a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick. She has studied Philosophy and Social Sciences in the University of Crete as well as Gender Studies and Social Anthropology in the University of the Aegean, where she also conducted her doctoral thesis titled ‘BDSM practices, socialities, sexualities: anthropological approaches’.

Christina Tente is a postgraduate student in the Visual Culture Programme at Lund University, focusing on posthumanism and transhumanism and the representations / performativities of (ab)normal bodies. She has studied Journalism in Thessaloniki and Film and Cultural Studies in Athens, and has worked with various cultural organizations and film festivals – such as Ethnofest – in Greece and in Sweden.

The website and database were designed by Apostolos Troulitakis.

The start-up phase of the project, including the creation of the Greek Crisis Literature Database, was funded through discretionary funds (via ERC-StG-335514-Nolas), the Research Development Fund from the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths University of London (2019-Varvantakis & Nolas), and individual research funds and research support from the Institute of Development Studies (Apgar).