Challenging Perceptions: being anti-racist

 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.

Reimagining Africa: A student curation project

By Kristen Harding, Student Curator 

In my second year as an English student in South Africa, our lecturer asked the class if we could point to Nigeria on a map. About one hundred faces stared blankly at the picture of Africa projected onto the screen ahead. To further prove her point, she asked us where Los Angeles and New York are, which we located almost automatically. It was a startling yet unsurprising realisation that we knew more about other continents than the one we were actually living on.

Photo: Africa on the globe by James Wiseman (https://unsplash.com/@jameswiseman). Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence (https://unsplash.com/license).

My name is Kristen Harding and before moving to England to start my Master's in Film and Literature at York, I studied English at Stellenbosch University for four years. As I progressed through my studies, it became clearer that stories – whether from books, films, the news or the radio – play a huge role in determining what we know and don't know about the world. It's this, together with my own position as a person from Africa, that inspires my project as a Student Curator Intern in the library this term.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be curating a list of materials available in our library to promote a selection of African stories told by Africans themselves. This will be to shed light on the fact that Africa is much more than the bleak, homogenous continent that Western narratives make it out to be. I would also love for the collection to encourage us to reach for African work not only for educational purposes but also just for the value of a good story.

Making a consistent and intentional effort to engage with discourses outside of those that are dominant, has the potential to open our minds to new ways of seeing the world. So I hope that the books, films, articles, and other media I'll be sharing through this project will contribute to a reimagining of the African continent that is playful, queer, and even magical.