Traces that leave traces: personal archives and present time

Abstract

This Thematic Dossier congregates and discusses the task of organization, preservation and, concomitantly, the use of resources of personal archives by researchers/historians of the area, both by national and/or international safeguarding institutions and by common people. These research studies identify with the theoretical framework of History of the Present Time when considering personal archives in the different layers of time that compose them, and for analyzing documents/events that are recorded as testimonies, in distinct temporalities. Personal archives keep materials and documents in varied supports that hold traces of the history of an individual and, at the same time, of the networks in which he is inserted, that is, they allow to identify other social actors and the inter-relations established in the lives of these individuals. Its importance functions as a privileged way of accessing the vestiges and traces of sensibilities, of staging of ritual acts, recognition of different practices of generational sociabilities shown through a discursive production in a certain time and place. Finally, it highlights the relevance of these materials/documents produced in the private sphere that, if collected, organized and socialized, can widen the horizon of possibilities around these archives when constituted as documents/sources for the research in the fields of Historical-Educational Heritage, History of Education and History of the Present Time itself.