Mediatory intervention in pandemic times

An ethnographic narrative of the Living Archive

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the planning process of the Living Archive mediation workshop with pupils as part of the Humboldt Labor. It deals with the prisoner of war recordings of the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, whose violent history(ies) are presented in the exhibition After Nature. The aim of the workshop is to discuss with pupils the colonial and racist context in which these recordings were made. This form of mediation is in line with the Humboldt Labor's participatory approach and the school's daily practice of so-called productive learning. I myself was involved in the planning of the Living Archive and it was part of my ethnographic research at the Humboldt Labor. In the following, I want to analyse the different planning modalities of the workshop within its larger relations to the institutional logics of the Humboldt Labor, the Humboldt Forum and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I analyse the central interfaces between the mediation in the Humboldt Labor, the format in particular, and political education in schools with regard to the topics of racism and colonialism. In doing so, I reflect on the ethnographic-mediating potential of the Living Archive from a student perspective, which unfolds two possible future scenarios: the vision of active participation on the part of the students and the design of the promotion of critical thinking about racism in school. At the same time, the article is interested in exploring the collaborative and engaged ethnographic research method itself as an anti-racist and postcolonial intervention.