LEARN
Conversations with community archivists, historians, cultural workers and artists working with archives
Exploring decolonial approaches to archiving, including frames and methodologies, through reflections, critical essays and articles.
Who does the work?
Decolonising archives is often unpaid labour led by diasporic and indigenous memory workers. Erinma Ochu, Tosin Olufon, Nadine Aranki and Abira Hussein reflect on care, refusal, solidarity and community-held alternatives.
Heritage and Ephemerality: The Politics of Black Cultural Memory
Inspired by Stuart Hall’s work, Dr. Lisa Amanda Palmer invites readers to think about questions of ephemerality and heritage.
Family Photographs from the Vietnamese Diaspora Set In Motion
Family photographs from the Vietnamese diaspora become living records of memory and migration. Carô Gervay invites us to witness how images move across generations, repaired, reimagined, and set in motion.
Mother Tongue – Language, Memory and Heritage
Dr. Tola Dabiri traces the genesis of this idea to the recurring discussions of mothers, their languages, and the inheritance of stories, at the April 2025 #UKCommunityofPractice convening. Since then, Dabiri has researched global changes in language diversity, examples of language loss, preservation, and safeguarding, and educational and legislative interventions.
Tapestry of Black Britons: Communities & Digital Space
The richness of British history is incomplete without paying tribute to the profound contributions of people of African descent.
Tapestry of Black Britons embodies this statement. Through our #UKCommunityofPractice convenings, founder Paula Ogun Hector was enabled to decolonise the tapestry co-creative process.
BLACK GEOGRAPHIES OF KINGS HILL, DOMINICA: A PHOTO-ESSAY
Home, heritage, and belonging – these are the threads that weave through this work. Consisting of 27,000 words of fieldnotes, analogue photographs, montage film clips, and soundscapes, “Black Geographies of Kings Hill, Dominica” is a record of the photographer’s first trip to Dominica.
Mother, Memory, History.
Through photography, poetry, and generational memory, Marcia Michael explores how maternal stories carry suppressed histories into the light and re-imagines archives as reclamation, where the Black matrilineal voice becomes both methodology and testimony.
“We, the Living Archives”
Our UK Community of Practice knowledge production series opens with “We, the Living Archives” by Dr Savita Vij reflecting on our Brighton gathering of memory workers, exploring archives as relational and emotional spaces. It emphasises archives as open, evolving, interwoven with identity, grief, creativity and collective memory.
Syrian Design Archive
Ezrena Marwan and Sally Al-Haq, co-leads of the Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAMy) programme, had the pleasure of meeting Hala Al-Afsaa, one of the co-founders of the Syrian Design Archive (SDA), during her time in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
International Archives Day 2025
The following audio reflections, recorded during the Liberatory Archives and Memory Brighton convening, feature members of the UK Community of Practice addressing the urgent question: How can we use the current political climate we’re in right now to shape the needs of memory work?
Majd Al-Shihabi and the mission to produce more knowledge and archives in Arabic
A podcast with Majd Al-Shihabi and the mission to produce more knowledge and archives in Arabic. This podcast is an episode from Whose Voices? published on March 13, 2023.
Memory and Invisibility: Feminist Research as Institutional Archive of Our Diversity
An article by Débora Prado written for GenderIT. The article discusses the role of feminist research in creating institutional archives that reflect diverse experiences.
Creating and Caring for Feminist Digital Archives in Africa
An article by Gorata Chengeta written for GenderIT. The article explores the creation and care of feminist digital archives in Africa, focusing on documenting resistance and marginalized voices.