 I'm Katie Eagleton. I'm director of libraries and museums at the University of St Andrews. So hello from Scotland. It's not so sunny here today, but I hope it's sunny where you are. We have a really interesting group of speakers today who are all early career researchers and professionals. And this is the first of a series of sessions where we'll hear from people earlier in their career about their experiences, the pandemic, the impact of it, and some of the things that they've done, which start to help us see the path out and the move to the next stage post-pandemic. So we'll hear from each of the speakers in turn and then we'll invite the audience to participate in the conversation. And really, I want to encourage you to all contribute and speak up whatever career stage you're at, whatever area you're in. The aim here is that we really think together about what we've been doing and what we might do next. So to speak up, ask questions. There's the chat is available. There's question answers there. We'll bring people in and we'll explain how that will work after we've heard from the speakers. So I'll start just by a couple of bits of housekeeping to go through. Obviously, you're all here. You know how this all works. If you have any comments or questions, use the chat box for those. If you want to join our speakers for conversations after they've given their presentations, you can raise your hand and we'll explain how that works. Then we're going to have presentations of 10 minutes each. We've got our three wonderful speakers on the screen here. So we've got Ambala Scales, Daniela Gonzalez and Diego Gupta. I'll introduce each of them before they speak, but they each have 10 minutes and then I will bring us back for questions and discussion. So starting with Dr. Ambala Scales, she's currently a research associate on the Black Health and the Humanities project at the University of Bristol. Her research is interested in Black feminist resistance in contemporary Black women's fiction and how literary narrative prompts us to challenge and think about alternatives to oppression and violence that are wrought under neoliberal capitalism. She's working on a monograph. She's published in a whole range of really interesting publications and venues, and she's here to open our session today. So welcome, Amber, and thank you very much. Over to you. Hi, everyone. Well, I can't see you all, but I hope you've all been enjoying the conflict so far. Just about to share my screen with you all. Yes, so I'm just going to start since we only have 10 minutes. So I'd just like to talk to you today about the project that I'm part of. I started as a research associate at the University of Bristol working on the Black Health and the Humanities project. So the pandemic has brought many challenges for ECRs, but it's also important to recognise that in some ways it has been a catalyst for social change. And in my case, the project that I'm working on may not be here if it wasn't for the pandemic. So today I'll be introducing the project, its context, and some of its key aims in light of the racialised health inequality that the pandemic has highlighted, and the sense of community that has been both strengthened and threatened. So in October 2020, I joined the Centre for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol to work alongside the principal investigator of the Black Health and Humanities project, Dr. Josie Gill. And there are two strands to our project. It's partly the establishment of an interdisciplinary network of 20 PhD students and ECRs who are all working on Black Health related topics in the humanities and who participate in a year-long online training programme which is led by experts in this field, so scholars and activists and archivists. And the development of the, so the other strand of the project is the development of myself and the PI's research publications in the areas of Black Health Humanities, African Biaspora Literature and Black British Literature. So it's not a coincidence that such a project was launched after the summer of 2020 and in Bristol. The combination of the global Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the racial health inequality in Britain, exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, led to a summer that had a revolutionary energy. Whether this was performative or genuine, institutions felt pressured to address racism and inequality and to take an active part in that social chain. In Bristol, after years of pressure from activists and academics, Bristol's City Council's slow progress to remove slave trader Edward Colston statue from the city centre resulted in the statue being torn down during the Black Lives Matter protests. This graph on my slide from the Artist for National Statistics shows that Black men are four times as likely to die from COVID-19 than their white counterparts. Although I haven't included the figures for Black women here, we are also four times more likely to die from COVID-19. Despite these statistics, the government have denied that racism is a factor in this reality. Dr. Josie Gill had been in conversation with the wild contrast prior to the pandemic and it seemed timely to establish a project that investigated health inequality and racism through the lens of the humanities. And in particular, to form a network of mutual support for researchers and particularly BAME scholars during this unprecedented time. You can read more about the context of the Black Health and Humanities project in an article I wrote to the Medical Humanities blog. In light of this broader context, some of the key questions the project asks include how have Black writers, thinkers, artists and the intellectuals represented and theorised Black health and wild being? How can the Black humanities shape and augment understanding of race, racism and illness in the medical humanities? And what role might the Black humanities play in improving health outcomes for Black people in Britain? During our initial research to track down scholarship and creative work about Black health, which included film, art, music, theatre, literature and much more, we realised that a lot of the work we were finding was focused on the US context. One of our aims was to bring Black British experiences to the forefront of conversations about how. Searches of archives revealed that some crucial work is suddenly out of print or absent from public conversations about Black health. To try to combat this, we put together a list of key resources about Black health, many of which focus on a British context, which is available on our website for public use, and I'll show you that resource list at the end of my talk. We realised that creative work offers responses to these questions and offers representations of experiences of illness and poor health that sits outside of the purely medical perspective. Works like Stellan in Yanzi's poetry, Jacqueline Moore's recently reprinted novel The Fat Lady Sins, non-fiction studies like Brian Dadsey in Scapes the Heart of the Reds and Donald Rodney's In the House of My Father, allow space for more holistic, emotional and even spiritual understandings of how health is experienced, as well as challenging the structural racism of health services and how environmental factors, poverty and even previous brutality affect Black people's health. Our network of 20 researchers is underpinned by an ethics of care. This ensures that members of the network have access to career development and training opportunities, as well as creating a safer space which addresses difficult health topics and ensures that we have time to reflect. This means that academic knowledge is not disconnected from personal experiences. Members of our network have expressed that for them it is a necessary space of community during the time of social isolation and an important space that allows them to foster research collaboration with one another. So an example of this is that they form the WhatsApp group and they share relevant events and opportunities, funding opportunities and those kinds of things. So we're also thinking about how to continue the network's legacy and many of us are passionate about creating structural change in academia and beyond and kind of approaching Blackness from a radical perspective and where that can lead to, so even beyond conversations about economising institutions. So I'm going to stop screen-sharing and then share with you our website. So I just wanted to show the website, might take a second to load. At the bottom you can subscribe to our newsletter. So if you'd like to hear more about the project and what we're doing as it develops, you can subscribe to our newsletter or you can follow us on Twitter which is at BAH Project and here is our resource database which I'd recommend if you're interested in Black Health or researching Black Health it can be, it's a really useful resource. It has lots of rare or difficult to find and critical and creative work so anything from poetry to art to films to art exhibitions, it's all there so I would encourage you to make use of that resource and have a look. And I think that's everything so I'll stop sharing. It's also, it's blackhealthandhumanities.org is the website address. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much and we'll put the links into the chat so that people can take a look because it looks like a really amazing resource and a piece of thinking and collaborative effort so thank you for telling us about it. We're going to hear from each of the presenters and then go to questions. So next up Dr Daniella Gonzales who is currently a catalogue on the Prepare and Move project at the Parliamentary Archives and also the Social Media Fellow at the British Association for Local History as well as the Communications Officer for the Archives and Records Association section for new professionals so pretty busy thank you for making time to be here today. Daniella is a historian of medieval London interested in political ideologies and civic records. She did her PhD at Kent and it was after her Viva that she had the idea she's going to tell us about today a thing called Mem's Lib. So over to you Daniella and thank you so much. Thank you Katie for that very kind introduction. So as Katie said I'm going to speak about Mem's Lib which was a collaborative project that I worked on with other researchers at the University of Kent. So Mem's Lib is an online lockdown library providing over 10,000 medieval and early modern scholarly online resources for those working on these historical periods and it was designed to help researchers keep researching during the COVID-19 pandemic. As I'm sure a lot of you experienced the pandemic and the lockdown announced by the UK government in March 2020 meant that any plans to visit libraries and archives were immediately put on hold. So for many of us this meant not being able to continue with our research plans and having to ask ourselves questions about how we were going to get our research done, meet deadlines and navigate this new online only world. So this set of exceptional circumstances yeah so this set of exceptional circumstances pushed to centre for medieval and early modern studies at the University of Kent where I studied to send out an advertisement to post graduates in the centre asking if they would be interested in being part of a team to create an online group for mutual support in seeking library material. The team would be made up of two individuals, one focusing on medieval resources and the other early modern materials. In the end there were five of us who made up the Mem's Lib team and you can see each one of us here. So the team was made up of myself, Anna Higland, Emma Louise Hill, Rosina Stell and Anna Nadine Pike. So when we first met virtually over Zoom, some of us having never met each other before, we did not start with the idea of Mem's Lib being a website. Instead we began by discussing creating a Google document where students and members of staff within the centre would note down their research interests and resources that they had available at home. Looking back at the criteria that we had been asked to consider, especially the need to facilitate group discussions, it didn't take very long for us to start thinking about different online platforms where people could not only exchange resources but contribute to free flowing discussions and share their subject knowledge. We asked ourselves what exactly were we looking to make and what kind of format we'd be using that would meet people's research needs. For us a Google document would not be the best place for this and we decided that creating a website would offer better opportunities to offer this function. So we did discuss making a WordPress site but eventually we settled on Wix so that we could have the resource forum which you can see on the slide. And I should say that all our discussions about Mem's Lib took place over Zoom and to this day I still haven't actually met one of my colleagues in person. So even though some of us did not know each other, it was really easy to trust each other as we all had a common goal in mind and wanted to help our community navigate this really difficult time. As post graduates we all knew exactly how our ability to research had been hindered and we wanted to make something that had maximum impact. One of our colleagues was also very experienced in using Wix whereas the rest of us were not and this meant that tutorials also needed to be made so that we could learn how to use this platform in order to meet our deadline. I will always be very grateful to the colleague who spent over two hours on Zoom with me teaching me how to go through Wix and as you can see on the slide we even used the video function on WhatsApp as a means to celebrate milestones and the launch of Mem's Lib. So intended initially as a tool for post graduates and lecturers within the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. Mem's Lib very quickly became a global phenomenon extending beyond the UK and reaching the shores of Australia, Canada, several European countries, South America and the United States to name a few. We have had many people including several post graduates and early career researchers from various institutions not only use the resources listed on the website but they have also joined as members in order to contribute and join in discussions in the group forum. So the website was launched on the 8th of June 2020 and provides an extensive and comprehensive list of online resources that are ordered by subject and time period. We have pages dedicated but not limited to early medieval history, medieval languages and medieval and early modern history and literature. And to do this we divided up the pages across our different research areas collaborating on research adjacent areas. As the medievalist myself I was responsible for creating the late medieval history page. I also worked very closely with my colleague who made the medieval literature page because of the overlap in our research interests. So central to making and curating these pages was ensuring that resources were up to date and that no links were broken. Equally we regularly updated the pages with the latest projects that we had come across or that had been highlighted to us. We also made it very clear what resources were open access and which sources were available to students at the University of Kent including within these resources where a login was needed. When we compile these pages we also prioritized making sure that our resources were diverse. On members of you will find for example several resources about the Islamic world like the AHRC funded project and the AHRC funded project medieval and early modern Orients and the Islamic books research blog. Resources such as teaching race and middle English literature, medievalists of color and Black Central Europe are also included. In grouping resources into different categories individuals using the site can get can get to the types of sources they need easily and have instant access. The resources are also free and are not restricted to members. Collaboration has been vital in ensuring Memslib success and it gave us the opportunity to draw on a wealth of knowledge to make sure that the resources on the website covered a wide range of research interests. Partners who contributed to Memslib for example included the Center for Kent History and Heritage at Canterbury Christ Church University specifically Dr Sheila Swedenborough and Dr Diane Heath who worked with us to produce a page dedicated to the history of medieval and early modern Canterbury and Kent. Equally as important was working with Dr David Rundle of the University of Kent and Dr Allison Ray of Trinity College Library in Dublin to produce a page dedicated to the study of manuscript studies. We also benefited from the expertise of Dr Peter Good, Nat Catter and Lubaba Alazami who contributed resources to our Islamic world page. The consortium for the Humanities and Arts in the Southeast was also extremely supportive and provided AHRC funding towards our history of the book page which was co-created by our co-founder Emma Louise Hill and Jordan Knowles of the University of East Anglia. Post graduates and staff of the MA in Early Modern English Literature Text and Transmission at King's College London also provided vital projects that are listed on our Early Modern Literature page. On the website there is also a form for suggesting a resource which has been a great way for various people to submit resources that they would like to see added. For this they need to provide the resource name URL and provide a description of the resource so that we can add it to the website. When we added this to the website we received several suggestions including projects from early career researchers which added to the quality of Memslib. Equally social media was an excellent way to receive further resource suggestions and engage others in these conversations. Memslib was undoubtedly a joint effort and demonstrated how collaboration continues to be vital within research communities. The knowledge of post graduates, early career researchers, academics and those working within the GLAM sector have made Memslib what it is. This expertise allowed Memslib to grow and develop into a platform that not only offers a wide range of projects for those studying the medieval and early modern periods but also has allowed for the MEMS community to grow and networks to expand globally. I cannot emphasise the overwhelming support that we have had from the research community and the positive responses when approaching scholars both within and outside the centre for medieval and early modern studies at the University of Kent. Since its launch the site has attracted a great amount of attention and received international praise from high profile scholars. Engagement with Memslib has also extended beyond university communities and several archivists and librarians have become members. Circulating the site widely amongst their colleagues Memslib even made it onto the archive lists of which was very exciting for us to see. As you can see from the slide many people praised Memslib and they saw it as a necessary research tool during the pandemic. Memslib even won physical lockdown student competition and my colleagues and I were very proud of what we had achieved. Receiving these positive responses has been great and shows the impact that Memslib has had not only helping post graduates and early career researchers continue research during the pandemic but the wider research community. I'm now going to give you a demonstration of the website to show you the resource pages, the forum which includes our notice blog, notice board and the Memslib blog so I'm just going to stop sharing my screen momentarily and I'm just going to bring up the website now. So this is our homepage for Memslib. It's got a very lovely chained library which is an image from Wells Cathedral and I'm just going to go onto the resource page to show you what this looks like and the various resources that we added so as I mentioned we've got pages for manuscript studies and the history of the book, we've got pages for early medieval history, history of art, the Islamic world, medieval literature and history. We've also got a page dedicated to early modern theology and different and other pages such as early modern drama and early modern literature and I'm going to go onto the medieval history, the late medieval history page as I created this one and show you the way that the resources are structured. So you can see that they've been categorized into different groups so here we've got digitized records and transcriptions and a big list of projects and other databases and follow underneath so we've got Beyond 2022, Black Central Europe, England's Immigrants, it's quite an extensive list. We've also included sites which include museum objects that can be used for research, different source books and other kind of resources such as medieval genealogy and the history of parliament. On each of the pages I should say we've also provided links to ethos and to other platforms that offer open dissertations. So this is what our forum looks like and as you can see we've now got these two notice boards so one of them is for uploading CFPs from medieval conferences and the other one is for early modern conferences and anybody can upload a call for papers onto there it's not just for the creators of the site and here are the different groups that you can join to ask questions, engage in discussions and ask other people for resources and the last page that I will show you is our blog where again they're divided into different categories so research, library updates, the different seminars at the centre for medieval and early modern studies and when we've appeared in the press or in other people's blogs or news so if you're interested yeah check these out and read a little bit more about Memslib where we've appeared and we've even had guest blogs from other students and early career researchers so for example we had post graduates contributing blogs to the website about what it was now like to return to the British Library during the pandemic and it's a general overview of advice and these people's experiences. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and share my PowerPoint again so since its creation Memslib has continued to expand and develop and the notice boards I showed you for example were the product of a discussion that my colleagues and I had with researchers at Codrivium in November 2020 who asked whether it was possible it was possible to have this so Memslib has not only been important supporting research during the pandemic but was also an excellent way for my colleagues and I to develop our skill sets to enter the world as early career researchers. Memslib is now curated by a new team who are working hard to constantly expand the website and to keep helping researchers continue to research during this time and beyond thank you I think that's it. Thank you I mean really amazing to see how that's grown from a sort of small collaboration into something that's used by people all over the place and I love the bit about unchaining the library because I can see lots of librarians and archivists in the attendee list it was heartbreaking to have to lock the doors and wonderful to see the way that this didn't fill the gap fully but did some work to bring people together with the resources they need so thank you. All right so we now have our third presentation in this session before we go into the discussion part. Dr. Dia Gupta is the past and present fellow for race, ethnicity and equality in history at the Royal Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Research. She's a literary and cultural historian and she's interested in the intersections between life writing, visual culture, material culture and literature particularly in response to war and she has a contract with Herston OUP on an emotional history of India in the Second World War so really looking forward to hearing what she's going to talk to us about today and over to you thank you. Thanks so much for that Katie can I just say it's uh it's such a pleasure to be here and we heard two incredible panellists talk to us about the the projects they were involved in which was which was wonderful um I'm afraid I don't have a presentation for you so you're just going to have to put up with my face talking at you um I hope I can be entertaining enough for you um so I thought I'd structure my my 10 minutes in two ways I talked to you a little bit about my own experiences as an early career researcher in the pandemic and then I can move on to more institutional responses as part of the Royal Historical Society where I'm affiliated so um as as you heard in Katie's introduction I am currently past and present fellow um of race ethnicity and equality in history at the Royal Historical Society it's uh not the prefiest title but it it captures the the remit of the work I do quite well and effectively the work I do is split into two categories so 50% of my work is on my own research and I'm writing my first book which is coming out of my PhD thesis and this is on an emotional history of India in the Second World War and the other 50% of my work is working with the RHS to promote its race and equality initiatives I don't know how many people in the audience are aware but in 2018 the Royal Historical Society published a very influential report um on race inequalities within the discipline of history and this has had this has had a wide-ranging sort of ripple effect not just in history departments across the country but within the heritage and cultural organization sectors as well so so one of the things that I did when I took up my postdoctoral fellowship in in October 2020 was to work with our then-president Professor Margot Finn in writing a follow-up this was the second follow-up to the 2018 race report and obviously interestingly and strangely all of it happened online so in fact my recruitment into the postdoctoral position I think I had my interviews in August 2020 that was online meeting Margot herself was online corresponding with everybody in the RHS to gather the information we needed to produce this roadmap was online I think to date I have met perhaps one member of the RHS face-to-face and I have yet to see where I would sit in the RHS office or or go in and have a have a perspective on the the physical location of the RHS but having said that and despite sort of the weirdness of that I think I would very much echo Daniela in the sense of sort of community that the RHS has created for me and how how welcoming and responsive it has been keeping in mind the strangeness of the pandemic so so let me move on a little bit to sort of the difficulties I faced while doing my own research so I guess in some ways I've been fortunate in that my book is coming out of my PhD and my PhD was finished in 2019 it was heavily archival based so I visited archives in in India archives all over the UK including the national archives and I think the nature of my work would have been fairly difficult to do in in pandemic times so I was lucky that the bulk of that archival work was done but nonetheless it's it's been tricky because there are new sources I need to consult there are things I need to go back and check quite a lot of this is in the British Library as we know all libraries and archives have been shut for a very long time and even when they have reopened it's been a staggered reopening you know you have to go online book appointments the appointments go like hotcakes I need an appointment at the Asia and African studies reading room at the British Library which is I think extraordinarily popular and and it's been tricky it's been tricky to get a booking there and tricky to get the work I I need to do done having said that though there's also been incredible support that I've had not only from the RHS but also from other library services so for example as someone who's affiliated to the Institute of Historical Research I have access to sanat house library I have access to the library at the Institute of Historical Research and you know I would like to just shout out to the librarians there and say and say that they have been really responsive really incredible when I have sent them queries asking them for scans of chapters or articles that I need that I cannot access without being on the premises they have scanned them and sent them to me sometimes within the same day which has been really quite extraordinary and I'm really really grateful to them for that perhaps now is a good time to also talk about the more institutional response that we've had at the RHS with regards to ECRs and the pandemic and I really thought it might be most helpful to mention one particular way in which we've sought to address some of the issues that the pandemic has raised for researchers and so so we've been thinking through how best to support researchers during the pandemic and we've had a a whole suite of funds that researchers at any time can access including research funding conference funding travel funds and so on but but during the pandemic obviously not all these pots of money were being utilized certainly not the travel pot so so we thought through this and we decided to launch a hardship fund in early 2020 but then in December 2020 the RHS got a little bit more ambitious and it launched a new RHS early career fellowship grant scheme and the aim of this grant scheme was to provide larger grants than what was available from its other schemes and so by large we mean up to £2,000 for up to six months of use and it was the decision was taken to make these grants as flexible as possible so bearing in mind that we did not always know the the exact difficulties that early career researchers might be facing so expenses that could be considered include living expenses including childcare or rent direct research experiences like getting copyright permissions, photo copying, digitization, image fees, subscription to online resources for example and even skills training and this is not you know an exhaustive list at all and we were very open to have people write into us and and ask us whether they could apply for something that wasn't covered on this list the only sort of real criteria we had was that applicants needed to outline a really tangible and discrete research goal so this could be something like writing a research article or submitting a book proposal enhancing their skills in concrete ways and clearly sort of explaining the rationale behind the amount that was requested so so this sort of covers the overall RHS response with its early career fellowship grant scheme but as I said before I'm also involved particularly with the race and inequalities work at the RHS and we have a race ethnicity and equality working group whose activities I help to promote and we are in current discussions right now of the best ways in which we can help ECRs of colour and so there are discussions afloat at the moment about what ECRs of colour need from historians more established historians and you know what can be offered to them and we're thinking through about having a mentorship scheme that supports ECR historians of colour this could be you know feedback on CVs and cover letters it could be looking through samples of giving ECRs of colour sample postdoc applications that are anonymised that they can look through and see what works and what doesn't just sort of demystifying the process of advancing from the ECR stage into more established trajectories in academia so thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you so much and I hope you get that appointment in the Asian and African reading room soon it's used one of the most busy spaces in the British Library I used to work there so thank you so much um so if we can have our other speakers putting their cameras on I think everybody listening will agree they were just three really interesting examples of how community and collaboration have got us through what has been a really horrible year and a half and that that responsiveness to what our communities need what people need and what the things to pay attention to are have been really important but also something about the way we've been able to think differently and to push forward change we need to see and I don't know from my point of view the challenge now for us as a sector is to make that stick to make it continue after the crisis to not kind of snap back to how we used to do things and just default back to how we used to do things what I'm going to do though now rather than give you a whole other presentation that wasn't scheduled is open up the discussion we're going to use a long table format which for those of you who've seen this before you'll know how it works but for those who haven't the idea is if you imagine us virtually speaking sitting around a table together maybe with a cup of tea or something kind of relaxed um conversational and that you are all in the room around the edges and you can put your hand up and join the table join the conversation we want this to be really sort of interactive and discursive we have some themes we think we'd like to talk about but if you have questions and things to bring to the table do and as I said at the beginning we really encourage anybody to join this discussion it's one that's not just about these projects although we may talk about those in particular it's also about our sector and how we move forward and how we learn from the best and the worst of the last year to be stronger and better for the future so while we're waiting to see if anybody's going to put their hand up to to see if they'd like to join there's some information in the chat about how this works and how you'll how you'll be added into the the imaginary table I thought what I'd start is by asking all of our speakers to reflect a little bit on how you think your work might be different in the future based on what you've learned during the pandemic are there things you want to keep there's been plenty that we don't want to keep but are there things you want to keep about the way we've been able to work and make just part of how our work gets done there are the sort of silver linings here um I don't know Danielle maybe over to you first yeah that is um that is a really good question um and it is really important to think about the ways that we have had to adapt working at home I mean speaking about mems lib the pandemic got me at a time where I had just um I had just done my viva and I was doing my corrections and by this point um I had taken all my books back to the library um and I didn't have them at home to to write my corrections and I was like oh my gosh like how how am I going to do this how am I going to access um the extra information I mean before I started working on mems lib with my colleagues I just used to go on Twitter and I was like please please does does someone have this just was like please help me I really need to finish my corrections um and even now in my in my current roles um I I did start remotely working in an archive that's not ideal when you work with the records and you need them in front of you um and particularly with new people that I'd I'd never really well I I'd not met before I'd met them very briefly when I did my interview over over zoom and and that was kind of it and it and it's really taken a lot um a lot of adapting I mean I think the one thing that I've really seen kind of from working from home and these different struggles of trying to research is I think that really has brought people together as a community and I and I really hope that that stays like people have been more than more than happy to help um everybody's in the same kind of boat and I just do hope that we can yeah again keep fostering those relationships not just between established academics but amongst post graduates and early career researchers and again that you know everybody wants to help each other no matter um no matter their background yeah absolutely there's a real sort of of need to keep that spirit of collaboration um before we go to our other two speakers I've noticed that one of your colleagues from members lip has joined us at the table welcome Anna do you want to add anything while we're on this team before we move on to our other speakers yeah I think well I mean for me I'm still finishing my PhD I should be done in the next couple of weeks so lockdown has been an interesting experience exactly a fingers crossed but I think I mean Danielle is exactly right that that and you yourself Katie that sense of community and helping each other out and men's lip has been a huge help but I mean I had to rearrange some of my research because I do not only textual analysis working on early modern drama but also practice-based work and so I had to think really quickly on my feet how to rearrange half of the research for my thesis when I couldn't do it in person anymore when the pandemic hit when we went into lockdown um so having men's lip as an example in front of me as that was happening was really helpful because it meant that that I could um kind of implement what I was learning a bit about my own research to help others but also get help collaboratively from that community as well so that was a really nice nice thing to have out of that yeah a lot of things to do any well and good luck with finishing your PhD that's impressive to be at a conference and doing all this as well so um so Amber anything that you think you want to kind of keep going forwards or anything you want to reflect on about the impact of working during the pandemic I think one thing that I'd like to keep and chiming with the kind of ethics of care that we developed on our network um is accessibility I think there's been a real focus on not only making things more accessible online for people that and people with various disabilities or not neurodivergent people and but also in terms of people being able to access things so for example um if events are kind of kept online or you know if they're workshops or or anything really it can make it easier for people with caring responsibilities to get involved and so I think have maintaining a kind of balance of online events and in-person events which I for one am quite keen to get back to also but I think it's really allowed me personally to to learn a lot about accessibility and um and how that can help shape our research when we're collaborating with other people yeah I think you're absolutely right there's been some indications haven't there that that the the upside to a horrible situation has been that some of the accessibility issues have been reduced that the disability attainment gap for example has narrowed that there's lots of ways in which that's really important um but there are I mean there are still very real and disproportionate and inequitable impacts that this pandemic has had which I think I think while we're looking for the silver linings I think that's also really important isn't it to hold on to the gains but to really be be mindful of the fact that this has not been the same for everybody who's been going through it um did you want to add anything on this this impact of working theme and and the things we're developing here yes sure I mean I think I would echo Amber in this and this might be an unpopular opinion but um and I'm no fan of zoom let me put let me put that out there but one thing that it has enabled is ensuring the access of our research to audiences that we may never have had otherwise so I have given talks on my research um online that have been attended by people in the states from Canada from South Asia as well as the UK and I think having that physically would have meant immediately restricting some of that audience um and I I agree very much I I miss physical events I just missing other people frankly and talking to other people face to face but I think having that mix of um in person events and online events is is perhaps a hybrid model we can we can start moving towards um I don't think that once the pandemic ends hopefully it will at some point um that we should just give up on the on on the reach that online events do give us yeah definitely so we have some more people joining the table welcome to Caroline Sampson and Vic Clark Caroline over to you was there something you wanted to bring to the group thank you yeah um really interesting insights into the challenges people are facing and the fantastic solutions um as part of my job um I work with a network of archivists who are trying to make life easier I guess so my question is if you could have one wish for something that archivists could do differently that would help remote research what would it be I I could take that I could take that on but it is really a dream wish I I don't I don't know if it's possible dream big dream big dream big okay fine I'll dream big it would be amazing if so there's a particular file for example that I might need from the eternally unavailable Asian and African studies reading room at the British Library if someone were to were to scan the pages I need that would be an incredible resource and support I completely understand it's not possible to do this for every researcher you have limited number of archivists and a limited number of people who can access archives for for pandemic reasons yourselves um but that sort of support and really the sort of support that's helped me through the pandemic has been people sending me scans of of things I've needed so that will be wonderful thank you anybody else got any this is your moment to make make requests but also I think it helps us think about the future post pandemic and we hope this never happens again but we can do things now to to make research better for the future so Daniela Amber anything you'd like to add yes um I think recognising also that that different archives are different access to funding funding and not every archive necessarily has the funds to make enough of their collection digital so for example um the George Padmore Institute um which has a lot of resources about uh black activism and um creative work critical work as I've mentioned um in the British context and lots of like historical letters and things like that a lot of that isn't available digitally um I think the Black Cultural Archives are also in the process of digitizing digitizing a lot of their collection that that has been quite a long process and then I mean I'm not sure if if that partly can be aided by the kind of the sharing of resources in a way that is a bit more equitable yeah you're right that the the historic inequities in how resources have flowed might might risk continuing a skew in scholarship and resource availability that that actually doesn't help us change the sector in the way we want to so be able to work together to advocate for the need to balance that out I think could be really powerful so thank you Amber that's great yeah Daniela over to you and then we'll go to Vic for another yeah um I mean I was thinking about digitization again I know that that costs a lot of money um there might not necessarily be the funding but I do wonder is ever a possibility of even having something like a virtual reading room um touch word this doesn't you know this pandemic doesn't happen um happen again but I wonder if that's the way to um to support researchers I was listening to really interesting paper this morning and from Joanna Green at the University of Glasgow and the really amazing technology that they have to have kept engaging students where they can you know the way that they can zoom in to to different um to different sources not just manuscripts but but more modern records and again I I know that that takes staff time that takes funding it's all very expensive but I do wonder if there is a way of virtually recreating the the reading room experience yeah and I have a feeling there's a project spinning up to look at exactly this option like how that option can scale up so watch this space I don't know if I'm allowed to say much about it but I think something's coming together but over to you Vic welcome to the table sorry I just muted myself there hi um so I was sort of wondering um about the kind of the role of intersectionality and access um particularly in terms of archives and I think um you know three of you are doing great work in terms of sort of trying to mitigate this sort of impact um and you know kind of with like the the MEMS and the back health and mantis stuff making these kind of generating these resources that can be accessed by lots of different people um and with the IHR fund as well I was um lucky enough to be a recipient of one of those early career grants um which was a huge help like after I'd done my vibrant didn't didn't really have any options so um I think yeah so the main thing I kind of just want to ask the panelists is what do you think needs to be done going forward to ensure a sort of um fair and intersectional approach to access for um of resources not just primary sources in terms of archives and stuff but secondary literature as well. Anybody want to start us off on that one? I can I can go um thanks so much Vic I think that's a great question and congratulations on receiving um that grant so I can only really speak I guess from the point of view um of the RHS um which isn't an archival or library centre of course um from from the RHS's point of view we've really felt that helping people um in terms of freeing up the ways in which we offer money is really important so not having so many restrictions on types of funding or who is eligible but just sort of opening opening it up and letting people apply for for larger grants for for discrete outcomes but but not being specific about the sorts of backgrounds they come from um is sometimes quite liberating um having said that again we're also conscious that there are obviously inequalities within the the discipline of history and we're trying to do more targeted work to to figure out how best to to kind of address those inequalities so so apart from money we also think that targeted mentoring is a really good way of of um of giving early career researchers a launching pad for their next steps you know of of demystifying some of the processes in academia and that might include access to libraries and archives. Yeah I think that's a really good point isn't it that that you mentioned in your talk as well about like sometimes just showing people how it works showing people what a good funding application looks like and and what how this all works helps people see their path to do what they want to do and that gatekeeping being taken away can be really important yeah does anybody else want to come in on this or maybe we can go and meet our new table member if there's nothing else to add on this? Just to echo what what Diaz said I sometimes feel like um when it comes to archives and resources I can sometimes be an assumption that everybody who is a PhD researcher has institutional funding to pay for them to go and spend time researching the archive for a certain amount of time so I think working without that assumption in mind and having um like what Diaz mentioned having less restrictions on grants more grants and even grants that are that are small and larger kind of grants for for people to be able to travel down to those archives and use them and I would even go as far to say that they shouldn't necessarily all be grants for PhD researchers but grants for independent researchers also or people that you know are in certain roles where they want to do more research into a certain thing and and also just to add that I think it's been it's been a start to see some universities that are offering kind of bursaries for black students to try to close the the kind of the pipeline from undergraduate to PhD and address the really dire lack of representation in many institutions across the country of kind of black PhD students and then early career researchers but I think it would be good to also see that reflected in the kind of archives and museum sector in terms of the bursaries and scholarships that are being offered. Yeah yeah that's a good point isn't it that just having the ability to go see what's there can do transformational and really open things up. I mean I was going to if it's all right Katie to add just in the context of Mem's Lib to make it yeah to open up access and to make sure it is intersectional I mean when we first spoke about creating Mem's Lib as I said earlier one of our priorities was making sure that it is diverse and it is representative and this is something that we did emphasize to the new team you know the way that we envisioned it to keep it expanding but this of course means that we'd have to reach out to to other people there might be you know resources that they're aware of that were not that's you know it's not within the remit of our expertise but it is within the remit of others and I think reaching out and making those connections with others in order to open up other sources to make them accessible to to highlight them will allow for that intersectional and interdisciplinary research at least in the context of Mem's Lib where everything is online. Yeah okay thank you and welcome to the table Alan said hello Alan's from the British Library but I don't think he can get you the all important booking Alan welcome what do you want to bring? Thanks Casey and I think first of all thank you for your great talks and really positive and I recognize and a lot of our PhD students collaborative ones have been going through exactly the same as well with some real sort of challenges around mental health and well-being during this period which I think we should acknowledge as well so I'm not saying it's all sun and roses but it was good to hear some positive messages that come out from you from your projects really inspiring. Casey's correct I can't get you your bookings we can't even get bookings for our own students and we share your views I think in the whole of what you've said really around skew distribution of access and also skew distribution of what is digital that's certainly not even for a largeish organization like the British Library as Katie knows that's in no way representative of what we have and I think that that is in itself the absence that bias shows you that you're not really representing what collections are available so I acknowledge all that so to get on to the question which I think you've actually answered but maybe if I can skew it a little bit how do you think the dynamics have changed for the way that you conduct research given the constraints that you've been plundering and I just wonder you know if you look at it in a sociological way what's that meant in terms of for example better inclusion for people that have access online access or I don't know how much of your demographic doesn't have access to online resources so that I'd be sort of interested to understand what how that's changed the dynamics of how you do your research and how you collaborate. Anybody like to pick up that question about how how the kind of collaboration and the dynamics of research has shifted I think Daniella was it you that made the point about you can go and speak all over the world without leaving your house and attend conferences all over the world I mean I think I found that to be amazing but also exhausting I've had to be much more selective about which things I go to and which things I speak at so that's that's been interesting that the barrier being lifted then meant I'd be more selective but anybody else wants to come in on that Daniella maybe you've unmuted. Yeah so I was going to say I know Dia mentioned that as well I mean I think I have to say like I do get tired of Zoom eventually but I do think it has opened up the possibilities to set 10 multiple events like UKT sometimes a few events that I want to go to I'm like oh no or even like at DC DC where there's multiple panels and I'm like oh no I want to go to everything this is so interesting I think it has opened up the possibility to have conversations with scholars who I may not previously have have ever been in contact with for reasons like it's it's too expensive to to travel or even sometimes if I thought is this conference or is this lecture as relevant you know is it going to be really relevant to my research am I or am I too you know if I'm too busy to attend or whatever but now actually it's been quite nice so I'm able to do multiple things at the same time sometimes now on my commute home I like tune into a lecture and and that's really great so I have found that it has opened up the world of topics to me I'm actually learning more about different things which I may not have considered before and how that ties in with my research I mean in terms of collaboration with others I again like pre-pandemic I've always thought that collaboration is really important I've enjoyed going to meetings in in person or having a coffee with someone at a conference and chatting about research but it has taken some adapting I mean in terms of members as I mentioned I was not website or Daniela I don't know if you're still there something seems to have gone wrong and we are almost out of time but hopefully Daniela's connection will restore very soon um dear Amber anything you wanted to add on this before I start to kind of conclude I'll just get us ready for some lunch oh oh you're back sorry something went really strange with the connection there almost making the point for you about zooming not always sorry no don't worry don't worry um so um dear Amber anything to quickly add um yeah sure um thanks for that question Alan and it's fine you don't need to get me an appointment at the British Library I'll wait um that's fine um yes I think it has changed the way I do research I'm a lot more open I think in terms of um who I can contact about my work you know whose work might be might be relevant for me um and and very and I find the fact that I can talk to them so easily and arrange a meeting with them so easily to be quite sort of liberating things as as much as you know at the same time I feel the weight of the exhaustion I think that you were talking about Katie um I do like the fact that I can I can share ideas so quickly I'll give you an example I'm currently being mentored by two academics as part of my postdoctoral fellowship so I have firsthand experience of you know how valuable mentoring is is for an early career researcher all of this is taking place online and while at some point I do hope to see my mentors face to face it does work you know the mentoring works the support works I I feel the the benefits of it every day so so I think yeah it's it's made me a lot more aware of how um of the possibilities of my work that I might have thought was narrow and confined are actually much more more broad reaching and open okay thank you Amber any last thoughts from you yeah just to kind of quickly add that I think the main way that I've changed the way that I've researched is that I have to find other ways to find community um I think I realize that I'm very much a social person and even if I'm kind of I work in a solitary way if I'm working on a publication or something like that I'd like to be in the room with other people even if I'm not kind of speaking to them so um part of what we've tried to do on the network is recreate that in a sense and um the the people that are part of it you have a lot of interaction with each other we have kind of virtual coffee to coffees and activities and and we do things like that so I think that it's it's important to maintain a sense of community academic one which is a kind right