In this chapter, I discuss the concept of archive and how I converse with the archive of the history of Danish education. The book is based on an archive of historical and contemporary sources documenting education policy and practice over time. However, an archive is so much more than a set of materials found in certain locations. Archives are not simply placeholders of evidence. They are not just a place ingenious researchers go to find answers to pregiven questions. In Archive Fever, Derrida (1995) pushes the notion of archive far beyond understanding it as an access to a fixed past. An archive never rests; it morphs and develops, and this opens the archive as a site of contestation and politics. Archives open questions about power by confronting us with disappearances and displacements. Moreover, in the relationship between researcher and archive, it is not always the former who is in control. In what follows, I discuss the understanding of archives that I draw on in my strategies for unsettling and being unsettled by the archive of Danish education history.

I begin the chapter by considering my own attractions to and entanglements with the archive of Danish education. Next, I present the diverse kinds of sources that I include in the archive that is the empirical foundation of the book. Working my way through distinct theoretical understandings of the concept of the archive, I then discuss the different approaches of conversing with an archive that I use in the chapters that follow from this.

The archive has us

As I describe in Chapter 1, my own arrival at this book project includes a personal inheritance, years of avoiding certain themes, and strange and partly unexplainable attractions to certain questions.