Archival Silences in Gender Interdisciplinary Social Humanities Focus in Uganda: A Decolonial Hermeneutic Analysis of Institutional Memory and Counter-Narrative

Rather than treating silence as an absence to be filled by recovering lost documents, the analysis conceptualises silence as an active, productive force within the architecture of institutional memory. Drawing on decolonial thought and hermeneutic theory, the article develops an interpretive framework for reading the conditions under which gendered knowledge is excluded, marginalised or rendered unintelligible. The argument proceeds through three movements: first, an examination of the colonial genealogy of the Ugandan archive and its enduring epistemic structures; second, a theorisation of silence as a relational phenomenon produced through classification, cataloguing and institutional procedure; and third, a consideration of counter-narrative as a methodological orientation rather than a simple corrective. This reframing has implications for archival practice, feminist methodology and the decolonisation of knowledge institutions in postcolonial contexts.