The Project
Breaking Archival Silences
Where do our stories begin?
A project dedicated to surfacing the hidden histories of Balkan diaspora communities across the globe.
About
Why archival silences?
The term "archival silence" refers to the absence of a community or experience from the historical record, not because nothing happened, but because no institution thought it worth preserving. For the Kosovar-Albanian diaspora community, this silence is profound. The mass migrations of the 20th century, labour migration, wartime displacement, post-conflict dispersal, left behind hundreds of people whose stories exist only in private hands, if at all.
Breaking Archival Silences is a long-term project to change that. Working with diaspora communities across the UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, we collect, digitise, and contextualise the personal and community archives that have never entered the public record and we make them freely available to researchers, families, and future generations.
We work alongside community members, not just about them, so that the people whose histories are being preserved have agency over how those histories are told. Many diaspora families hold photographs, letters, and documents that have never been catalogued. We work with communities to identify, preserve, and contextualise these materials before they are lost. Written records cannot capture the texture of lived experience. Our oral history podcast records first- and second-generation voices, creating a permanent audio archive of migration stories.
The most fragile archives often resist the strongest silences.
Diasporas Speaking
Listen to the podcast →
Breaking Archival Silences
Do you have archival material to share?
Learn more about the Breaking Archival Silences project.