ABSTRACT
Michael Moss and David Thomas challenge a number of assumptions about the impact of silences in archives – the belief that they are always present and the common trope that the marginalised are most likely to suffer from them. They describe how visceral and political they can be but that the release or revelation of information does not always solve anything. They then discuss the impact of the digital on researchers using archives and finally they raise their greatest concern about silences – that archival practices have turned records that were intended to be spoken out loud – to be performed – into texts to be read silently and by so doing have robbed them of much of their meaning.
