Celia Edwards is currently working for the Library as a Student Curator. (You can read 'Reimagining Africa' here, by her fellow Student Curator Kristen Harding.) In this post she describes the toolkit she's working on, which we hope to make available in the next week.
When George Floyd’s death made headlines around the world in May 2020, it felt like a watershed moment in world history. Sparking the largest racial justice protests ever seen in the United Kingdom, the following months of campaigning, listening and learning highlighted the ‘covert racism’ experienced by so many in the UK. Now, almost 2 years later, how can we ensure our academic thinking is underpinned by anti-racist thought?
Using library resources, I’ll be curating a toolkit to help students take an informed, anti-racist approach to university level reading and research. While some of the texts we’ll use are classic works on racial equity and equality, others have been published within the last 6 months and offer new ways of thinking about racism in academia.
Using these resources, we’ll look at the big questions that weave their way through every element of our university experience. How can we apply a critical, anti-racist framework to the study of historic academic texts? How can marginalised narratives be brought to the forefront of our studies?
These aren’t easy questions, but I hope the resources in this toolkit will go some way to answering them. Many of us bring ideas of how race intersects with gender and the past with us from childhood, and it's time to change this. To begin, we need to be informed and start thinking differently.
About the Student Curator:
Hello! I’m Celia, a final year history student here at York. During the first COVID lockdown back in March 2020, I found myself drawing on the library’s online collection to keep me occupied and informed. Later that year, I moved to the States to study abroad for a year. There, I found myself relying on York’s collection yet again! A passion to share the library’s wide-ranging non subject specific resources with other students is driving my Student Curator project.
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