In this talk, Marika Cifor will reflect on the archival methods connecting two book projects. Cifor’s first book, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (Minnesota, 2022), uses archival ethnography to examine how activists, artists, and curators have preserved and reanimated the history of AIDS activism, arguing that archives are as central to understanding AIDS as the biomedical event itself. Her current project extends inquiry at the intersection of archives and AIDS to buyer's clubs — grassroots organizations that emerged first in the early AIDS crisis and used bulletin board systems, databases, and phone trees to challenge biomedical authority and facilitate access to experimental treatments — as critical sites of data activism that predate and prefigure contemporary responses to datafication. Together, the two projects ask what archives and archival approaches makes possible for feminist STS scholars: attending to absence and silence, to the multiple dimensions of records, and centering communities whose survival has depended on documentation.
Marika Cifor is Associate Professor in the Information School and Adjunct Associate Professor, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. A feminist scholar of archives and digital cultures, Cifor is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS and has published widely on community archives, HIV/AIDS, and feminist and other critical approaches to archives, data, and digital technologies. She serves as Associate Editor at Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. In 2025-2026, Cifor is a visiting researcher with the Data Loss Project at the University of Copenhagen.