 I gave a great pleasure to introduce Dr Hannah Ismail, the collections and research manager at the Black Cultural Archives, which is an independent archive based in Kingston, South London. Hannah completed her PhD on the development of black-led archives in London from the department of information studies in UCL. Hannah will present, as part of this, the approaches of the Black Cultural Archives in deigning with questions of inclusion and diversity ymyddiant. Hannah, oedd ymddangodd! Melodydd yn credu, Jane. Thank you to RLUK for inviting me. As everyone says, I'm just going to start to share my slides. We'll see those. This is going to take a slight detour from what I suggested. When Black Cultural Archives' has approached to discuss our methods the decolonisation in conversation with the border efforts and the heritage sector, I took this as an opportunity to perhaps present something that was a little different and to pose the questions to the extent to which the sector can be decolonised. This is an area of interest for me. Most of what I'm thinking about posing here are very much unfinished thoughts and works in progress. These are also my personal thoughts, and not necessarily to those taking as those yw Llywodraeth Cymru, ond yn fwy o'r cychwyn i'r cyfnoddiadau ar gyfer gael y cyfnoddiadau ac'r cyflwyno'r gyflwyno'i a'r cyflwyno. Daeth gŵr o'r cysylltu'r cysylltu, rydych chi'n fath yw ymgyflwyno'r cyllid ym ysgol. On ddim yn cyfnod i ddim yn argyrchol o'r ddechrygiadau o'r ddechrygiadau i'r sector honno fel y bydd o'r gael y celfnogol Cymraegol. Yn ymwybod, Tuck a Yang rydyn ni'n gwneud iechyd. Mae'r ddechrygiadau iso am y metafol. Cymdeithio, mae'r awdurdd wedi'u cyffrediniau dechrolon. Roedden ni'r weithabodd pa'r theory, ddweud a'r wirthiglŷt. Mae'r bydd y sefydl iawn, rydyn ni'n greu'r bydd gylawn. Roedden ni'r verb ac roedden ni'r llond yn cael ei parodd a chi'n gweldio i ddweudad y cwrsau a'r rhainwyr, wrth i'u sefydlu cyfgaredd, a'r rhainwyr astr anfaithau, ac arweithio i'u gweldio i답uame gan gweithredu. o'r fflinwyd i gwneud y tîm clywg raisedoddau, yn gallu bod yn gweithio ddechrau diwielio'r reilgrith yn y lle lacking. Pysyn ydy y gallwn y gwheodau a'r dynnu atoddau a'r ddaf o'r ddau a'r ac diwielio ac roedd ddefnyddio dictatorship ac yr ingyndio eu gweldor. Roeddwn i'n meddwl i wneud diy dod o'r shotgun o'r ddึf, ac oeddwn i'n meddwl i'r adeg ffordd i gweithio ac roeddwn i'n meddwl i'r ajw ydyn ni. a fyddwch i gael ei wneud yn ysgol yng Nghymru a'r ffordd i gael. Roedd J.J. Gadar yn ymdillu'r rhan o'r rhan o'r ddweud yn y cyfnodau a'r ddweud, rydw i'n ddweud yn gweithio'r cyfnodau sydd ymgylchedd yn ymgylchedd i'ch gael'r ddweud, ac yn ymgylchedd, rydw i'n ddweud yn gweithio'r cyfnodau. Yn y cyfnodau, mae'r ddweud yn cyfnodau haf ddweud yn gweithio'r ddweud, First, the physical process of granting self-determination and independence to former colonies, often after armed rebellion from colonised peoples, and second is for our purposes to undo the effects of colonisation. However, I also want to remind us of what Amy Césaire wrote, that colonisation equals unification. So we must also resist the temptation to think about colonisation as a thing, or a destination, but as a process and framework. I think it is vital that we begin the process, begin the process and understand the different frameworks within which we operate. But for the latter part of my talk, I will be focusing on some of the major shifts we must engage with, if we are to think and practice decoloniality. I also think that it is worth restating that decolonisation efforts are very specific to the shape of colonisation. What decolonisation looks like in South Africa, Canada or Australia looks different due to the different historical processes and actors. So again, when we think about or talk about decolonisation efforts here in the centre of empire, we need to be very clear about what we need. Whilst we can look to the activities and take inspiration from those struggles, we must resist importing them wholesale, as this once again leads us into the chronologic of sameness. As Professor Hakim Addi also reminds us, it is sometimes worth being in mind that the active and process of decolonisation is something that should be undertaken by the colonial powers and not something that should necessarily rest with those who have been colonised. However, of course, there is crucial anti-and decolonial activities and theorisation taking place across the former empires of Western European states. So if decolonisation efforts are to take place here, in many ways it must feel led by the colonial power and not left to those who are affected. I also need to make clear that I'm talking about the practice and process of archival theory and the management of archives rather than necessarily archivist material existing out in the world. And although the two are intertwining to such an extent that it is difficult to untangle them. Returning to Tuck and Yang's description of decolonisation, I am also reminded of Audru Lorde, particularly her often quoted, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. And I invoke this due to Lorde's work as a librarian and the added dimension that this brings to the specificity of considering decolonial work within the archival and library spaces. Whilst I don't have time to necessarily delve into these specificities, it is important to think about both archival practice and theory alongside the ideas of houses and tools separately, but also fundamentally how the archival theories rest and function as both the master's tools and the master's house. Alongside Lorde's work, I'm also reminded of houses and borders, particularly Derrida's often cited description of the genealogy of the term archive in archive fever in which he discusses the nature of Freud's archive. In the opening of the text, Derrida writes. The meaning of archive is only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arpeon, initially a house, a domicile and address, the residents of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and dignified political power were considered to possess the right to make or represent the law. On account of their publicly recognised authority, it is at their home in that place, which is their house, I've got house, family, and employees house, that official documents are filed. Derrida opens his essay by bringing attention to the power dynamics inherent in archives, something which we have, I think, almost come to accept. In the context of the colonial origins of our theories, the power is clearly vested in the colonial authorities. This opening quote also brings attention to the fullness of thinking about colonisation in the sector, as many ways we cannot think outside of the archive and our theories. Derrida argues that the word archives itself also inhabits the idea of a commencement as material becomes archive once they pass a threshold and are transformed into archives by the act of passing the threshold and entering the house. As a deconstructionist, Derrida was interested in language and the power that language has in shaping our worlds and how we think about them. Derrida was also interested in literally deconstructing our language and associating discourses, but also looked at how we are also imprisoned by said language. Most of Derrida's work was interested in the archive in some way or another, and he was particularly interested in how texts and history of texts are bound up with one another, as a text contains its own history and are always in the process of being remade. Derrida argues that no text is ever fixed in time and that we as readers bring our own understandings texts, which are informed by our own understandings. In terms of how this affects archival science, this shifts the way we think about some of our core values such as custody and ownership, the need to fix a record in time and raises questions about the nature of recordness and the value of authenticity and reliability. For archivists focusing on the importance of fixing records, evidential and legal purposes, this postmodern focus on slipriness and change is one that cannot easily be reconciled and speaks to the nature of true decolonial work. Returning briefly to Tuck and Yang, Derrida's work also provides an additional impetus from my avenue that we need to be mindful of how we deploy the use and activities of decolonisation and decolonial rhetoric if what we mean is diversity, equity and raw inclusion. True decolonial work would not only change the nature of who is allowed in and who represents archivists, it goes beyond diversity and challenges the very nature of the house itself. It is clear that underlying much of the discussions on archiving and archival practice, is this continuation and attempt to fix and solidify the nature of archives in history writing, particularly through the formalised training of archivists, through the development of the masters, in the development of courses such as the masses and archives at those at UCL, and particularly under the direction of Sir Henry Jenkinson, renowned as a father of English archives. Henry Jenkinson was born in South London and attended Dunlidge College, a private school renowned as a pathway into Oxbridge to Oxford in Cambridge, and specifically with the intention for those to go into training into civil service, and necessary into the cloning office. Whilst I was aware of Oxbridge as being one of the main routes into the cloning office, it never occurred to me that the idea of service in the cloning office was seen as an important career option from an early age. Jenkinson went on to work at the National Archives where he cut his teeth on dealing with the material that had been amassed at the then public record office. Jenkinson used his experience to advocate for specific training in archives administrations, previously archivists for trained families, librarians first, in the library school founded at UCL in 1991, and then later to codify his thoughts, Jenkinson wrote one of the first textbooks in archival administration. What is key here, and by no means revelatory, is that much of Jenkinson's outlook on the development of archival theory is interwoven in both his training and operations in the civil service and the role of archives as part of the apparatus of governance. It is also telling that during the physical process of civilisation across the British Empire and the move to flag attendance, there were several approaches to what to do with these vestiges of clearing room within the archives. For some, the archives were forcibly removed by the British government, but for others they were attacked and burned during the 1972 Irish War for Independence. I've also been thinking a lot about the specific role of the development of Jenkinson manual at the Department of Information Studies at UCL and UCL more broadly, particularly the development of library and archive practice and how it codifies a profession. In my research, my light research for this paper and to what is known as the world of UCL, I was also looking at the circulation of white supremacists and specifically eugenicists ideas through the role of Francis Galton. I've been thinking about this in terms of how knowledge was understood and codified in the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in terms of who gets to know and what they can know. Whilst I haven't found any specific connections between Galton and the development of library and archive science at UCL, I've also been thinking about the importance of space. In 1904, Galton created his own record office called Eugenics Record Office on 88 Gower Street, which is now practically cited opposite the current Department of Information Studies where he, Galton, and others dedicated their time to creating and storing records of genealogical and family trees of those he deemed to be superior. For me, this brings attention to the role of networks and how the transfer of ideas are circulated and to borrow from Sarah Ahmed how these ideas inhabit spaces and start to inform them. Whilst this may seem unscientific or perhaps unsubstantiated, we do think that these less tangible connections also make a big impact on structuring our practices and thought processes. As I will discuss later, the role of eugenics and the desire to record, to cash-grub and control is another key aspect of current thinking that we still live with today. I've recently left the role of a teaching fellow at UCL working on a module for the Record Keeping Professional, in which I spent time attempting to make and remake these boundaries about what profession looks like. Often against Jenkinson's definitions of what makes a professional, what makes archival material archival, in which he was very clear that only administrative records and only records pre-1918 could be qualified. The question of what is archival clearly raises important questions about the nature of archival collecting that continues to question traditional archival assumptions of value and the role of evidence within our theories and practices and as outlined undergirded through colonialism. It would be impossible to discuss the role of values and colonial logic within the broader heritage sector without a discussion on the role of whiteness in fundamentally framing these discussions. Within my research and within the archive sector specifically, whiteness relates not only to those who work within the sector, but also structures the approaches to the archive and the understanding of what archives are, so relating back to Derrida and his house and the kind of borders around that. In his work, archivist Mario H. Ramirez argues that much of the archival community's response to broad discussions on social justice is in effect an attempt to cure the whiteness of the field and to maintain the status quo. Drawing on the discussions within archival theory and the world of presumed neutrality and objectivity, Ramirez highlights the ways in which whiteness is often viewed as an invisible signifier taken for granted because the marker for what is normal or objective, particularly within the archival sector. As for the highlights in Stuart Hall's 1999 keynote speech, Whose Heritage, one of the great unspoken issues around diversity and the practice of diversifying the sector is that quote, by and large, this process has so far stopped short of the frontier defined by that great unspoken British value whiteness. One of the byproducts of whiteness is the way it shapes practice and what is considered appropriate or professional, which is outlined, also shapes the requirements of funding and associated value judgments. Hall's comments on the whiteness of the heritage sector relates not only to the sections themselves held within archives, museums and libraries, but obviously also to the staff who handle and process these collections and as I said, inhabit so much of our own professional practice and how we understand our role. This whiteness in the sector has far reaching consequences ranging from accession and appraisal to cataloging and interpretation. And in Hall's speech, he also spoke of the real difficulties associated with ensuring change within the sector, which can be taken even further if we grapple with the root causes and structuring of whiteness, which is codification of racial hierarchies that fuel colonialismism. In 2018 to 2019, I wrote an article entitled Reclaiming History, in which I began to think about the colonial bases of archival theory and management. For my research, I've been particularly interested in the ways in which these questions of whiteness and professionalism have contributed to discussions about what type of material is deemed to not only be valuable in a historic sense, but also what type of physical material is deemed valuable. I have also been lured by the attempt to fix the ideas of alternative languages to seek the first or the new, but these are in many ways within the logic of the coding system of binaries and boundaries, which we clearly owe much to the author cited Jenkinson. In writing this article, I attempted to think about the alternative theoretical genealogies of archival thought practice through the work of Arturo, often known as Arthur Schomburg, whose library and archival collections form the basis of the Schomburg Centre, which is now part of the New York public library system. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was a pottery-conborn tax scholar who devoted his life to collecting material on black history and culture. Schomburg acted as a first curator for what was the New York library's division of Negro literature, history and prints in Harlem from 1932, and this was his death in 1938, after donating his large collection of material to the library in 1926. The building was renamed after him to the Schomburg Centre in 1940. I use Schomburg to analyse the history of collecting within the broader Pan-African tradition and the different intellectual frameworks that speak to the processes and theory of archival building, independent of European theory, but clearly in discussion with it. As a migrant from the Spanish speaking Caribbean to Harlem, New York, at a time of fast shifting demographic changes, Schomburg's biography offered me a key insight into the workings of the diaspora and the Pan-Africanism. At the centre of the intellectual networks in Harlem, Schomburg was also at the centre of the development of the Harlem Renaissance, and through his friendship with African American philosopher Alan Locke, he articulated his ideas about historical recovery, a key aspect of Pan-African thought. Writing in Locke's New Negro anthology, Schomburg described his approach to collecting in an article called The Negro Digs Up His Past as working to, quote, what restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset, end quote. For Schomburg, it was the collection of material such as documentary evidence of black achievement in addition to publishing that he thought would undo the damage of enslavement. To the building of his archive, Schomburg wanted to provide evidence of historical continuity, and more importantly he articulated a theory of recovery and a process by which to undertake it rather than the English and European approach and idea of neutrality and passivity, so he was very much involved in that process. Through his connections to the Harlem Renaissance and the Garving movement, Schomburg's articulation of the Pan-African ideology of historical recovery would then find the legacies in several political and cultural movements including Negritude, which emerged in the Francophone Caribbean through the work of Cesar, Leopold Tengor and Frank Svanin, and later in the Black Power movement and the rise of Astafari in Jamaica and Britain. However, through this writing, this talk today and has been illustrated in my article, it became clear that in order to descend to Jimkinson, I have spent a vast amount of time recounting and figuring back into the piece. Much of this frustration has been borne in many ways to the expectations and practice of the academic exercises of writing and particularly the politics of citation. In order to make my point and to make it legible within archival discourses, they still needed to create a sense of legibility to bring the people to where I was, but through the European Centre of Jimkinson. As highlighted by Derrida, Romero and Paul, this I think is a fundamental difficulty in any attempt to decolonise a sector. In order to create legibility, we are conditioned and continue to need to orient ourselves this way. This, of course, is not a new intervention and is dealt with by Sarah Armidved in her work on the role of whiteness, specifically the use and role of diversity within institutions. Aside from these theoretical underpinnings of some issues of devolverisation, I'm now going to turn to touch on some of the practical implications of colonial thinking within the sector. Much of my work has been thinking about the continued physical impacts of colonisation across the world, particularly the effects of the climate crisis and as Gadda urges that we need to go beyond our immediate context. To return to my fundamental argument, to truly turn to the colonial, to be an engagement with and potential destruction of many of the ways in which we fundamentally understand the role of archival and archival theory. For our colleagues in the sector outside of Europe, there has been the growing use of land ignorance, recognising the violence, colonisation and the forcible movement, the forcible movement, the removal of people from their ancestral lands through acts of genocide and that later forced them to reservation to serve segregated houses and ghettos. The colonial gaze that rendered the indigenous and Aboriginal peoples both invisible and expendable has obviously permeated our collecting practices that have created gaps and silences. Alongside the extractivism of colonialism, including the processes of transatlantic slave trade that kidnapped Africans into the Caribbean and the Caribbean and the Americas to cultivate other transplants of crops for the benefit of plantation colonies, through to the scramble for Africa and the colonisation of the Pacific and Australia for oil, gas and precious metals, this need for overconsumption is still present. Recently, there has been pushback from the sector in terms of how we think about how we see funding from oil and gas congrats, but there is still much work to be undertaken to engage with the extent to which we need to remove ourselves from this web of capital, sometimes secretive and opaque, that is a legacy of these processes, but also still deeply intertwined whilst active mining and destruction of the environment is still taking place. Clearly, whilst some organisations and companies are currently looking into the legacy of transatlantic slave trade on their financial development and using the language of operations, I personally cannot take them seriously if they are still engaged in supporting contemporary mining operations that are destroying the planet and keeping people from their ancestral lands. Truly colonisation would clearly mean a complete break with these income streams and again something which might seem insurmountable at the moment. I've also had some additional perfecting thoughts about the very nature of collecting. Obviously, there has been many interesting interventions into grappling with the colonial obsession with collection and collecting objects, particularly in the case of ethnographic museums and subsequent course of restitution, but I've been also thinking about the archival urge to continue to collect. Whilst a lot of remedies to colonial collecting as a corrected, including black cultural archives, it relies on the logic of more and more to fill the gaps and absences we need to continue to collect with the necessary impacts of the need to create more space and build more stores. As already outlined, much of this is tied to the fundamental archival impetus to collect and control the frame of collections, particularly through our focus on cataloging as a means of exerting physical and intellectual control over our holdings. Whilst there are clear and obvious reasons and rationales for doing so, particularly within our colonial frameworks, we also need to think outside of these methods and mechanisms of control to embrace the equilibrium of access. The move to the digital also gives us a potential opportunity to save everything, and again, whilst there have been many important interventions in thinking through the dangers of the big data model, the obvious issue here, again, is the physical impact. As we probably already know, and all know, the digital has a physical impact somewhere. From the mining, as mentioned, of precious metals needed to build up other devices, to the space needed for server farms and the ongoing energy requirements, the legacies of climate change and the climate crisis does not affect all countries equally, and it will again be those formal colonised countries in the global south that will continue to be disproportionately impacted by our decisions made here. On the related issues of the physical and intellectual collecting, I also wanted to think briefly about the legal frameworks, particularly copyright. Clearly copyright is another legacy of the logic of ownership, and I'm well aware of the protection that copyright affords to creators, but I'm interested in the tension and of the desire to share knowledge on copyright funds that slows these down. I'm thinking about the use of copyright in older collections, where copyright is assigned during the digitalisation process, and specifically the use and attribution of copyright on to colonial collections, when the question of ownership is already politically contested. Alongside this, there's also the presence of paywalls, but I'll leave this as I'm being. To think about ownership in a truly decolonial way, there's clearly a lot of work to do to think about the protection of people's intellectual and moral property, but even then how we think about property needs to be approached against the need to give access. For collections and collecting practices alongside copyright and ownership, there's a clear question of deposit and ownership, and within our current legal agreements, taking legal ownership of collections also makes sense. But how do we imagine our role in terms of donors in our collections that don't necessarily fall back on these ideas of ownership? On the flipside, as argued by Daniela Augustino in her Archival Encounters, rethinking access and care and digital colonial archives, the move towards more open access has also wrought all the dangers of colonial thinking. Continuing with the theme of consumption and control, Augustino highlights the dangers of re-circulating and re-inscribing harm and trauma through the circulation of digitised colonial materials that continue to remove personhood and agency from colonial peoples. Finally, extending this discussion about space and power, the second point I wanted to make in relation to the Masters House, Space, Archives and UCL. It sounds like I've got a beef with those UCL and we don't, is the role of Bentham and the development of the Reading Room practice. For those of you who are unaware, and the corpse of Bentham known as its auto icon, is on display at the new student centre. Previously Bentham's body was on display in the South Voices of the Wilkins Building, and for those of you who know UCL, it's the big white one in the middle, where I walk past every time I was on campus. I mentioned this relationship between Bentham and UCL, as there has been some research on the role of Bentham's ideas on our surveillance and the panopticon and the development of Reading Rooms. Some archival scholars such as Jarrett Drake have pushed this focus on surveillance, including thinking about the role of archives and Reading Rooms in terms of prisons and the castle system, that continues to place boundaries and borders on who is physically allowed access and how people experience these systems, as well as the border conversations about power, boundaries and surveillance. However, I don't want to leave with the sense that all is lost. As I hope has become clear, I'm certainly not arguing against true attempts into commonising our practice, and I have been attempting to engage with DECO and Frameworks to help further my thinking. Key to some of this has been the work of Christina Sharp on what she describes as the wake. Sharp describes the difficulties of working with instructors that, even as we attempt to disrupt them, they continue to do violence, so much of what I've already been discussing. Sharp suggests that living and working in the wake is a way of living with and paying attention to colonialism and the effects of migration. By paying attention to the wake, we may be in a better position to understand and start to undo the thicknesses. To think about how we can engage with a colonial archive, along with Sharp, engaging particularly with the work of Saadia Hartman in terms of dealing with what is lost, the debris of Akili and Bembe, and as Mose Fuentes and Colony argue, that what is the failure of the archive. Whilst it is still important to take the starting point that colonial archives haven't failed within their own terms as the instruments of government and control, I take these principles and Hartman's work on critical population as a different tool towards the colonial processes. It may also be possible to think of these principles of debris and loss as potential correctives and not necessarily creating new archives within the process of consumption and control as outline, but more metaphorical ways of thinking about knowledge and power and thinking differently about what is needed by different communities. I see some of these approaches within the principle of Sankofa, a return to what is lost and the idea of using the reparative framework to think about the importance of archives time and liberation. During my thesis, I predominantly considered Sankofa and the reparative as part of what Sharp would consider as her wake work dealing with our colonial present that in many ways is still in conversation with colonialism, but it also seeks to disrupt what is knowable and imaginable. The work of Sankofa also seeks to disrupt the idea of a linear colonial time and again could offer new ways of thinking expansively about what we do, how and why we do it. However, as we are still living with colonialism, I wonder about the extent to which we are truly able to imagine freely and expansively as we can only really imagine with the material that we already have and know. It is clear that so much of our theory and practice is derived from colonial logic sometimes, which is why I start from the question of the extent to which aspects can be decolonised. Not because, as I said, I don't see the necessity of decolonisation, but as our sector itself is a colonial construct, I think about what would be left. If it means that there would be a wholesale destruction with building everything that we know, then I guess so be it. As I have hopefully made clear throughout this talk, I do hope that at some point we can reach a space in which the sector truly engages with a radical break that the colonial process is called for. However, as I have made clear, I remain skeptical about the use of the term decolonial when we may in fact be talking about diversity or anti-racism, whilst ensuring diverse anti-racist and safe spaces of vital that continue to be cautious about truly decolonisation. Thank you. Thank you, Hannah. Let's go get my video on. Gosh, that was a lot. Thank you very much and thank you for that half hour of learning. I really appreciate to be able to stop and to listen to what you had to say. If anyone has any questions, do put them up in the Q&A or in the chat, but the Q&A would be better, it's easier to manage. The things that whilst people are doing that, the things that stuck with me is the more is more in relation to collecting and also the conflicts around copyright. I mean, I knew but it's really good to hear it articulated in the way that you did. I've got a little question, but I'm afraid it's related to UCL, so I'll try and frame it in a way that isn't UCL. I love UCL, because I was there a lot of times to think about it. Of course, it did have a eugenics department, and I was called that Bentham, whatever you called it, I can't remember what it's called. It's called the auto icon. Auto icon, of course. Whilst you were there, because you were there a while, did you see a shifting or a nuance around the colonisation work in that department? Or diversity, anti-racial work from it just being a thing to it being a process or a framework? Did you see any shift? Yes and no. As I keep saying in my talk, I think sometimes where I'm trying to come from, the issue is not. The good work being undertaken is the use of the frame. There is and has been some amazing work in information studies around grappling with anti-racists and community-centred archives. But again, I'm not certain it's decolonial and I'm not certain that the way that universities are structured, that any or most work that comes out of universities can be truly decolonial. Until, as I say, all those kind of ripples, all that kind of external stuff is also dealt with. So it's hard to practice decolonisation in an institution which is still funded and has networks and issues within these kind of colonial frameworks. Okay, thank you. You might see a comment in the chat about your lectures were very good and your comments provoked a lot of thought while I was there, so that someone who obviously attended your lectures when you were at UCL. I have a question for you. Okay, does abolition include, does abolition include the archive? If so, how and what's the alternative? This is a big one. Yes, it does. As I said, so much of what we do and what we know historically comes from the archive. But as I said, I don't know what comes after. As I say, it might be a case of starting from scratch and whether we're ready to do that. I don't know. I know I spent a lot of time there at our, but I think that it is so much about what we, how we think and what we think is so kind of embodied in the archive, embodies in our knowledge structures that how one goes outside of that. But I mean, I am imprisoned in English. And so I think, you know, part of a decolonial framework would be to engage with the languages and thinkers outside of English, outside of Western European languages to kind of really think about how our concepts can be shaped by different kind of thought structures. If that makes sense. Our language structures, how we think so different languages might help us also to think outside of what we really know. Yeah. Okay. There are a few comments about the citations. So I think your citations went down really well. So do I think would be nice to get the full citation on them. I've got another question for you. So brilliant paper. Thank you, Hannah. There's lots of brilliant going up in the chat so you don't have to read it. Very interesting points about ownership. In the absence of true decoloniality, do you think it might be about a different prioritisation, i.e. prioritising regarding cultural sensitivity ownership over traditional concerns like copyright? Definitely. And on the kind of work of citations, there's a wonderful academic called Kimberly Christensen, who works with Aboriginal and Native American structures and has put together a Catholic system called Mocha2. And so there's that kind of work that's already been going on. And I think, yes, definitely, as I say, thinking about what is needed by communities rather than what we within the kind of illegal framework need within our systems. I think it is a point to start with kind of asking people, you know, what do you need and how can we help rather than saying, actually, no. I mean, I was going to include a case of a museum who had been approached by a black community group to use materials related to enslavement. And that the museum had digitised and put copyright ownership on and was in charging community and hundreds of pounds to use that material. So, yeah, kind of moving towards decolonisation, be to kind of think outside of our policies and our kind of practices to kind of really understand how some of that continues to do harm. And how, you know, the material was about enslavement people and asking their potential, what is now, not answers, it's the opposite answers, family, to pay for that material. Yeah, I think it's obviously really problematic. Descendants, yes, thank you. So are you able to bring any of this thinking and this work into the Black Cultural Archives and the work that you do in the Black Cultural Archives? I'm trying to. So, particularly around the digital, we're really, really thinking about access and ownership and trying to not put things behind paywalls, not trying to make things as open access as possible. And one of the things that we try to do is also work with our donors to try and work out what is how they want to continue to work, because I mean Black Cultural Archives has dominated the 20th century archive. So quite a lot of work on deposits is still very much alive with us. And so rather than taking material, kind of the donation material as the end point, kind of start it as the beginning point and the conversation about how material is used, how we use it, how it might be used by other institutions. Obviously, that's a very long process. It's a lot of time, it works for BCA because we don't have as many collections as so large. I like the National Archives of the British Library. But yes, it's very much kind of trying to be mindful about why material has been donated to us and how it's being used, but ensuring that it's being done with kind of community or at least the donors in mind rather than like thinking about it and like, oh, well, this is how I was taught. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. That's good to hear. I have another question for you. Okay, you mentioned that you often engage with different decolonial frameworks. Is there a framework or an approach that you found useful in your practice, so back to your practice again? In particular, yeah, as I mentioned, Christina Sharp's work, so she's an African American literary scholar. And so she talks about the idea of the wake or wake work. I think the book's called On Being in the Wake. And so really kind of starting from the point of understanding and trying to grapple with the legacy. So quite a lot of my research is about trying to unpick and untangle, I guess, organisational biographies. So how organisations develop, how do they get, how they got into where they are, and how do we kind of continue to engage with that. Because I think sometimes we don't really, whilst we may know the history of our organisation, we might not necessarily very kind of truly grapple with that. So how we take that as a starting point, but also don't take it as like, has to be all the time. So you know, an organisation has an arc, but you know, just because it's been done before, or this is how we used to do it. So Christina Sharp, and as I mentioned, I'm Sadia Hartman, and her ideas around critical population. So the article that I'm particularly influenced by is called Venus and Two Acts, and it was published in a journal called Small Acts, Small Acts AXE. And yeah, and so she just kind of talks about a lot about the political union archive, a lot about how some of the things we just can't know, but also how we can kind of think about our imagination and the imaginary as a way, not necessarily as a corrective, as I said, but hopefully not in a way of like, all we need to collect more stuff. But also how do we engage, I guess, for the absences that doesn't lead to having to create more and more stuff and collect more and more things. Okay, okay. I don't know if you can see that chat, but everybody that there's quite a number of people putting references into the stuff that you're referencing, which is, which is, I guess, I think that's what they're going to do, but that's great. Alice is actually doing some research into the into our organisation and how our organisation was set up, and how that influences some of the collections that we have. Okay, so she's interested in the theoretical notion of recovery and archival work. So you mentioned this was a theory developed by Schomburg, and it's been applied in a range of black lead or pan African archive and heritage settings. Do you have any thoughts on how recovery might be a guiding principle for you university archives, which are predominantly white lead? Yes. So, as I said, yes and no. So, as I mentioned, the idea of recovery is very much within a pan African notion, and it kind of pan African theories, and it takes the starting point of the rupture that the transatlantic slave trade has wrought, particularly on black communities across the world, that we just, for those who are descended, African descended, that there's just some, there's just nothing else that can be knowable outside. And so, the art of Schomburg's articulation of it was that material exists, material that exists to kind of speak to black agency and black presence, particularly in a kind of society that's constantly telling you that you don't exist or misrepresenting one's history. But, as I said, part of that is within the kind of logic of colonialism, so it is in conversation with collecting practices, which is why, not that I don't think it's really important, it's a very important anti racist kind of struggle, but I'm still kind of thinking through about how that would work as a decolonial kind of framework where we might not, we might not necessarily need to collect, and institutions may not necessarily need to exist anymore. So, but yes, I think for universities and recovery is a really, can be a really helpful process, but again kind of working with the communities closely with whom the material that you're trying to recover and what is, what works for them, rather than what the university thinks. This is, I mean, none of this is like new thoughts that I've had, you know, people working in decolonisation in diversity work of endless articles about kind of how to do this practice, but I think that kind of is at least a starting point. And then you can help people just move towards what this kind of decolonial break would look like. Okay, okay, that's, well Alice, so I've said questions now and speak more with you, but I'll let you do that outside of here. Okay, I've got one last question from David Prosser, who is interested in an early point that you made about the responsibility of colonial archives to fix their own problems, which I think is what we've just been talking about. So agree, but how can then sure they don't fall into the same old decolonial, we know the best place of thinking, so continuing with the colonial mindset. As I said, that's in a way the. Yeah, it's the big question, isn't it? It's the, that is the question and that's the kind of issue with kind of decolonisation as it stands is that we want to get into the deep fear about it. It's like, how do you go outside of what you already know? But I mean, there's actually a really great piece that I read by an academic called Temi Odenusi, which is on our website. And it's again thinking about decolonisation as a, as a praxis as a framework rather as a thing we get to. 10 things that 10 things that you can start doing in part of it is history reading coming to where people are trying to kind of move outside of some of these binaries. It's kind of binary thinking that we're engaged with basically trying to be a nice person, but a nice kind of understood being generous with your time. All those kind of things are kind of parts of these kind of decolonial. I can try and find it's, if we have time to quickly to kind of paste in the chat, it will be in my recent searches. So this is about stakeholder groups and advisory groups and how, how can they help? I mean, it's difficult, isn't it with representation, but have you got any thoughts about how they might be able to help the process? Yeah, so we, we've recently, you know, you asked me about how do I kind of try and incorporate some of this in BCA. So we've recently finished a Welcome Trust funded project to Castlebob material relating to mental health activists. And part of the key aspects of that was to create a working group, not only with the donor, but other archivists and people working both within the mental health field and those who have experienced mental health and call mental health. And as all these things is kind of bringing people in from the beginning, so trying to find ways to actually have allowed them to meaningfully shape the project. You know, I said this is not, this is not new, but getting people in from the ground, recognising and supporting them. So, as far as possible, if you can pay people or find some ways of getting people into the payrolls, their expertise in the time is financially contributed, but also taken on board in the process as well. And just talking to people and trying to work out how within your institution you can do that work. So this, you know, one of the main issues, particularly around diversity is piecemeal or tokenistic kind of involvement and also being prepared for people to highlight flaws and not get as hard as one can, not get defensive about it. Because, you know, people are, particularly if people are engaging with you, they want to help. So kind of being able to take that on board and find ways of enacting that change. People keep telling you the same thing, nothing changes, then kind of in yourself. So yeah, paying people, bringing them in from the ground and taking on board, I have to say, I think would be the kind of main topics. Sounds like a fabulous place to stop, actually. Thank you so much. And thank you so much, Hannah. There's a lot of love for your talk and celebration about your talk in the chat. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you everyone for listening. I can be found online.