Comparative Archival Ecologies: Mapping Alternative Audiovisual Media Collections, the first hybrid ACTIVATE workshop, focuses on the questions of audiovisual archives’ role in the politics of preservation and presentation of countercultural, alternative media. It aims to bring together media and audiovisual heritage archivists and scholars in the fields of sociology, film and visual studies, cultural history, archival studies, and digital humanities to explore—in historical and comparative perspectives—how audiovisual archives (in a broad definition) preserve audiovisual collections of alternative media and political dissent.

Two decades ago, the editors of Global Media and Global Activism (eds. Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw, and Neil Stammers, 2005) strove to bridge a divide between academics and activists, and “to integrate these dimensions of contemporary social and political reality” (p. 2). In 2010, the notion of “mediactivism” was conceptualized by Dominique Cardon and Fabien Granjon, who referred to mobilization and the critique of dominant media and established practices of information production. Generally embodied by alternative expressions and the countercultural forms typical of the 1960s and 1970s, this link between social criticism and the media was explored over a wide chronological spectrum and various types of screen media.

In 2020, in Insurgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader (eds. Chris Robé, Stephen Charbonneau), several contributors included reflections on the archival aspects of activist media collections, highlighting the dispersed and often arbitrary storing conditions of the collections. Nevertheless, until recently, studies on media and activism rarely reflected on the principles of collecting, preserving, and curating alternative media materials