archives 101

Last week AIUET archivist, Jo Robson, together with freelance archivist Jane Speller (who has been helping us to catalogue the Anwar Ditta collection) ran an archiving workshop for all AIUET/ RRRC staff.

It may seem odd that we all work with archives on a daily basis, and still need training.  However, the majority of us have qualifications in other areas (History, Museum Studies, American Studies, Biomedical Science even!) and are particularly ignorant of recent changes in copyright and data protection law that effect the records we collect and the data they contain. So a crash course proved extremely useful all round.

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There Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack

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© Anwar Ditta

Cataloguing the archive of Anwar Ditta by Project Archivist Jane Speller

Work has begun cataloguing the archive of Anwar Ditta.  A collection which traces the extraordinary story of one woman’s 6 year fight with the Home Office to allow her three young children right of entry into the UK.

As Paul Gilroy eloquently describes in his seminal book, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), the double standards of British imperialism fostered the sense that Britain was the Mother country whilst nationalists from Winston Churchill to Enoch Powell strove to place the citizens of the Commonwealth at a distance and to ‘keep Britain white’.

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Reflecting on Dundee Study School

By Laila Benhaida, Trainee Archivist

On April 29th I embarked on a four day study school held at the University of Dundee. The aim of this trip was to become familiar with the university, meet the tutors and fellow students and to understand a bit more about the content of the modules I will be studying before I start my online distance learning post-graduate course in Archive and Records Management.

Photograph showing a building at the University of Dundee

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Reflecting on my Experiences at the Centre

Holly Randhawa

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Some of the books kept at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre Library.

The first two months of my placement at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre and Education Trust, based in Manchester Central Library, has been both an enriching and rewarding experience. As part of the University of Manchester’s Institute for Cultural Practices placement scheme, I have had the pleasure of working with the fantastic team at the library and archiving some extremely valuable resources along the way. Looking through some of the Centre’s archive collections, such as the Legacy of Ahmed project was a great way to get started, giving me a chance to learn about how this incredible organisation was founded and the crucial work that they do.

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Speaking for Ourselves – Again!

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From L-R: Parvinder Sohal, Raj Kaur, Daljit Singh, Philip Baldwin, Martin Palmer, Kanta Walker

By Laila Benhaida, Trainee Archivist.

Earlier this month our archivist Jo Robson, together with volunteers Daljit Singh and Raj Kaur organised a reminiscence session at Manchester Central Library. Participants – including Daljit and Raj – comprised staff and members of the management committee from ‘Speaking for Ourselves’. SFO was a landmark oral history project with Manchester’s Sikh community, funded by Manpower Services during the 1980s.

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Memory, Archive and Resistance

A young Richard Leese to the right (The Tandana archive GB3228.6)

As part of the World Without Borders activity focusing on the trial of the Stansted 15, the GLC Story archive hosted a teach-in that reflected on the long history of resistance to immigration controls and the relevance of archiving for today’s activists.

The event was held in London on 9th February 2019 and was attended by nearly one hundred people, many of them active in campaigns against deportation. It provided us with the opportunity to reflect and discuss ways to learn from the past, to document contemporary injustices and provide materials for future activists. Continue reading “Memory, Archive and Resistance” →