UK Community of Practice - Liberatory Archives and Memory

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.

January 16, 2026

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.

January 6, 2026

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.

December 11, 2025

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.

December 1, 2025

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.

November 17, 2025

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.

November 3, 2025

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.

October 6, 2025

“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.

September 22, 2025

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?

June 9, 2025