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Hello. I am Dr. Hannah Ishmael. And I am here at Black Cultural Archives, an independent archive based in Brixton, South London, where

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I was the collections and research manager. So the main challenges are thinking about the kinds of material that you can find that help tell the histories of Black women

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particularly but women in general. So the types of records that we're used to using, so those administrative records, are less likely to be available from women's perspectives.

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So, particularly for Black women, one of the main issues is around time, so time to sit down, time to write, time to have basically to do that kind of work.

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So if we're thinking about the history of enslavement, the history of colonialism, the plantation system, so women always have been-- Black women always have been in the labour market in some kind

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of way. So unlike more noble women who have the time to run estates, who have the time to sit down and amuse the Jane Austens of the world,

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time to really think about their perspectives, that is not available generally for African women, women of African descent. So the histories that we hear about Black women

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tend to be written about them, so written from the perspective of the enslavers or from the perspective of a colonial office, colonial people.

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So hearing from them, they just don't have that capacity and resources to write about their own histories. And within that, within resources,

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is also the issue of education. So again, Black women will not necessarily have been educated. As I said, generally, they would have been enslaved throughout the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th

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centuries. And then from the 20th century, the educational opportunities were just very limited, particularly in the Caribbean where there was a lot of--

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and continent of Africa, a lot of under-resourcing of the education system. So women wouldn't have had the opportunity to go to school. And particularly there's that gendered issue about education.

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So if you have a limited amount of money, you may favour sending your son to school because of the systems that we live in that men generally have more opportunity.

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So alongside the time, the labour that goes into running a family or being a woman having to contribute to your family, you just don't have the time. You don't have the education to do that.

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And then as we move into the 20th century, there's the difference in technology. So access to technologies who also has the resources to sit and have a computer, who has the resources

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to have the education to understand how to use a computer. But alongside that, we start moving into the 20th century, where women

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are able to take more control. So they have more education. They have a little bit more time. We have to take control of those resources.

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So particularly for publishing, particularly within Britain in the Black Women's movement, that political movement that brought Black women's histories to the fore, women were actively involved in the technology, the production,

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the publications of books and magazines and being able to start engaging and telling histories from their perspectives. So there are lots of different reasons

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why Black archives have been established, as many reasons as there are Black archives. Some people may be surprised to hear that there are a number of Black archives in the UK

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and several across the world, but they are less well-known. Also, how we might define a Black archive is shifting a little bit as well. So there are mainstream organisations who have "Black

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archive" in their titles somewhere, so they're quite obvious, quite easy to recognise. But there are a number of other community groups who also perform a kind of Black archival function, which

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I'll come back to in a minute. But in terms of why they were started, they are predominantly issues around narratives, particularly in the 1980s when the majority of them were founded.

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They were finding that the histories of Britain were being written, but they were being written without mention of the Black presence in the UK, particularly.

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So for a number of Black archives, they found that they were being written out of history. And for many of them, they were actively involved in the shaping of elite politics in the UK.

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And they were finding that there were histories being written about the 1960s, the 1970s, and they weren't including the perspectives or the histories of the Black communities who have been present in the UK since

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at least the Roman period but definitely since the post-war settlement of the-- post-1948 with what's known as the Windrush generation. So a lot of the Black archives were setting themselves up

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to reinsert their histories, reinsert their narratives, into the broader mainstream narrative of Britain. And a lot of them were also thinking about, how do you tell the history of Britishness?

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How do you tell the history of belongings, particularly if they're excluding Black people? And the history of Britain is so interwoven with enslavement, with colonial, with the colonial era,

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with a post-colonial era that to write a history of Britain and not even consider the empire or consider those people of Black, Asian, Chinese heritage in Britain is a complete distortion of the true history of British empire.

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So I said a lot of those archives started to grapple with the question of, well, where is the evidence of the empire, where is the evidence of belonging,

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where's the evidence of citizenship, and started to build their own collections to help counterbalance those narratives. There are three Black archives in London

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who have very similar but also very distinct histories. One of them is the Black Cultural Archives based in Brixton, and their history is bound up in education.

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So the development of educational resources, particularly within a multicultural education system set in the 1980s. A scandal was emerging from the 19th--

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from the 1970s that was showing that Black children in particular were being removed from mainstream education and put into what were called educationally sub-normal schools, or schools for

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the educationally sub-normal. It's not a framework that we would use. Now, we maybe thinking more about special needs or children with disabilities or learning disabilities.

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But what was happening was a number of Black and African children were being removed wholesale from mainstream education, put into these special schools. They had very limited chance of then re-entering the mainstream

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education system. A lot of the children who were entering the schools in the 1970s were either coming from the Caribbean.

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They maybe have been born in the 1960s or the 1950s, hadn't seen their parents for about five to 10 years because their parents were coming over, settling down, maybe starting new families.

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So they were coming over to Britain. They were essentially facing trauma, facing a post-traumatic stress because moving from one system to another with parents that they may not

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know, with whole new families. So they were dealing with stress and trauma, and so they were becoming quite reserved. Knowing, putting in below, coming to school,

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and then the teachers were seeing their reserved nature and assuming that they were not very intelligent and moving them out again. So there was a big scandal, and it

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was documented in a book called How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System by Bernard Coard. That book addressed all these issues.

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So a number of activists and educationalists came together to find ways to deal with that. And so Black Cultural Archives comes out of that movement to create multicultural education

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resources because they felt that providing Black, white, and Asian children with positive histories of Black-- positive histories, mainly Black histories, would be a way of undoing and addressing

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a lot of issues around racism and racial stereotyping. So a lot of the founders of Black Cultural Archives began looking for material, particularly in Britain, and started to find it quite readily

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and then built their archives around presence of Black people in the UK spanning as far back as possible. There's another archive called the George Padmore Institute that has a similar history but also different.

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So the founders of the George Padmore Institute came together to, again, deal with education, but they were also very involved in activism in the 1960s and the 1970s, particularly around policing

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and criminal justice. And again, as I said, they were finding that their histories weren't being included. So they started to click, correct, collate

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their own archive. They come out of a publishing house called the New Beacon Books, which is one of the oldest Black publishing houses in the UK and started to develop their resources.

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And then there's another archive called the Friends of the Huntley Archives at the London Metropolitan Archives. And again, they came out of education.

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They came out of publishing and also dealing with the histories of social justice and radical politics that they found, where they were being left out of particularly even things

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like the miners' strike of the 1980s. There were a lot of solidarity movements between Black and Black communities and the miners, and that kind of history was starting to be written out.

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So they were an integral to making sure that particularly the radical politics was being written, including people of African descent, particularly around women's involvement.

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So the development of protests around contraception or creating the opportunity for women to have contraceptive pills, so much of that is bound up in Black women's engagement

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in the women's movement. So quite a lot of the archives are held-- quite a lot of the archives held-- hold this history of Black women's engagement

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in those social justice movements, particularly around education, particularly around policing and women's reproductive health as well. So to return to the question about Black archival practise,

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so I've mentioned three archives who are constituted as archives. They have Board of Trustees. They have a volunteer programme.

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They have a building. They work as mainstream traditional archives do. There are a lot of community groups who fulfil that kind of archival function.

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So they collect histories. They do exhibitions. They tell histories mostly of forgotten people, like the kind of experience of Black women,

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and they try to teach about someone called-- someone like Nanny of the Maroons, who's a famous figure particularly in Jamaica. So the Maroons were a group of previously enslaved Africans

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who escaped from the plantation system and set up communities in the hills of Jamaica. And one of their most famous leaders is a woman called "Nanny of the Maroons,"

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so the Maroon community. And so they will tell and keep the histories of these really important women and run Saturday schools. So run schools outside of mainstream schools,

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teach these histories, and keep the transmission of history and heritage alive in the way that obviously mainstream archives do, but they may not necessarily collect the material in the same way.

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They may collect more ephemeral materials, like posters and leaflets, and create exhibitions on phone board or laminated exhibitions, much more DIY culture, perspectives.

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So there's a way that Black history, and particularly history of women's involvement, gets captured within these more community groups that help to transmit the history and heritage of Black culture and history and heritage just

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slightly outside of these mainstream systems. And a lot of the practise of organisations, like the Black Cultural Archives and the George Padmore Institute and the Friends of the Huntley Archive,

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they are related to these groups. They share some personal-- they share some personnel, but they are just constituted slightly differently in terms of how formal or informal they are.

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As I mentioned, a lot of the mainstream historical records that we're used to are those administrative records, minutes of meetings, board reports, and reports that are things that businesses and colonial

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governments and administrations tend to create. Community archives tend to think about archives a bit differently. So, often, community archives are much more interested

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in recording evidence but thinking about evidence much more broadly. So rather than thinking about evidence in that legalistic way, about thinking about-- well,

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will this end up in court? Community archives are much more interested in, does this tell us something about the presence of communities?

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And so community archives tend to collect much more broadly. So unlike some mainstream archives which might only collect paper or manuscript material, you'll find there are a lot of variety of material

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in community archives, such as oral histories, that ephemeral material that I mentioned, so leaflets, posters, prints, much more diary-type material. They may also collect objects.

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They may collect paintings, posters-- what other things-- pottery, just anything that if it's created by someone within the community or relates to an aspect of community culture or history,

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they will tend to collect it and make a kind of a narrative or make a story out of it in a way that's much more different to-- more mainstream archives and museums and libraries.

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There's also that division between museums, archives, and libraries-- doesn't really matter to them either. So as long as it tells a story or says something about the community, they will collect it.

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And they will look after it, and they will make some kind of use out of it. So in terms of filling those gaps, as I outlined earlier, they will help to tell the history from the perspective

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of the community. So, often, as I mentioned, mainstream archives, mainstream libraries, are very much about capturing what the elite think about a community

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or think about a person rather than-- and often that will be imbued with sexism, racism, whatever other stereotype there may be within the elite culture versus a more community-based culture.

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And so community archives tend to try and disrupt those narratives, try to tell completely different stories from their perspective, with their material. So they are able to use it to intervene and to capture

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much more admitted history, so particularly histories of women. So community archives tend to focus a lot on women. So organisations like the Black Cultural Archives

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and the George Padmore Institute have many more records written by women and about women because of the energy that women's involvement has in community archives in a way that is not really collected at mainstream--

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the mainstream levels. So that's how they interact with telling different stories from different perspectives. So for a lot of community archives,

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that division between museums, libraries, and archives isn't as cut and dry as it is for mainstream archives and museums and libraries. So for smaller organisations, they tend to collect a lot

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of different types of material, including a lot of published narratives, such as the works of Mary Prince, Mary Seacole-- being quite an outstanding figure, especially within Black British archives and libraries

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because she published her memoirs, and she was such an important figure particularly in the Crimean War and shortly afterwards. And also journalists like Una Marson.

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We don't really know much about her because she didn't she didn't have a formal archive. But we do know her because she was able to publish her poems, publish her plays, and her involvement with the BBC.

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We can think about different avenues, different ways of learning about people. So it doesn't necessarily have to be through the more traditional archives.

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Researchers can think a little bit more broadly, including, if you feel confident to, things like fiction, self-published narratives. There's so much wealth of information

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about people's experiences, particularly women's experiences, that can be found in those books. I also think it's quite interesting to think about how we even think about literature,

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so how those divides between what's seen as formal literature and the different genres, how that might help us to think a little bit about telling different stories.

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So some literature is allowed because men write it, and therefore it's important. Whereas, other literatures which are more seen to be the preserve of women, and therefore

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less valuable, may be really interesting and important sources for thinking about different ways of writing history. So they're Pulp Fiction, not romance novels.

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Those kind of things might be an in to thinking about women's lives in a different way that might be more fruitful than going through this more narrow archival or library or museum

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avenues. So a lot of community archives tend to hold a vast array of material, as I've already mentioned.

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But one of the things that I'm really interested in particularly is the ephemera material that a lot of these community collections hold. So ephemera is basically archival stuff.

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It's a word that is used when trying to describe a variety of material that people don't really know what to do with or what it is. The strict definition of ephemera

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is material that's not designed to last. So it'll be material that's printed for use within a very short period of time without any kind of sense that it would last a long time.

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So it's like posters, leaflets, things that maybe come through your door that you throw away straight away because you're not interested.

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But in terms of telling different histories, I'm really interested in ephemera because it can be the lens through which you really understand how communities or individuals are operating

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what they're interested in. And if you take-- if you have one leaflet, it might not tell you very much. But if you have a thousand different leaflets

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or a thousand different posters, you really get a sense of what someone's interested in, what they're doing, what communities are doing at that granular level.

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And so the kinds of material-- materials along that ephemeral to-- organisations can have a lot of ephemera, and they're really interested in collecting oral histories

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because of, again, that question about, well, if women's histories aren't collected in this more mainstream, more administrative history, how do you find out about what women are doing?

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The most obvious answer but sometimes ones that historians of the past struggle with is you ask people. You ask them.

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What are you doing? What are you interested in? And so organisations, like the Black Cultural Archives, like the George Padmore Institute do,

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hold a lot of oral histories because they were interested in asking people-- contemporary people-- what they were doing and very, very early on started collecting the histories of women

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because a lot of women were involved in political campaigning, activism. Black Cultural Archives, for example, holds material relating to a movement called

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the Black women's movement, which ran from the late '70s to the early '90s and was a very radical active feminist network. And so in about 2010, the Black Cultural Archives

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did an oral history project called "The Heart of the Race," which is a title named after a very important book which was published in 1985. And so they spoke to about 36 women

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who were involved in the Black women's movement. And from then, more material came in, so a more traditional archival material alongside more ephemera and leaflets, t-shirts,

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that kind of campaign material. And so from this really small collection of stories and histories, you start to build out and collect much more snowball,

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gather more people's histories. And so that's the kind of material that is collected. So, often, with this kind of ephemeral material, there's also questions of representation.

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So as I discussed earlier, it offers a different sense of representation about people being able to represent themselves, often as ordinary people doing everyday things.

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So within the ephemera collections I'm particularly interested in, there's material about women organising birthday parties, co-running creches, doing things that are really important to women, not only as gendered as women but also what

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works for women in the labour markets as well, so allowing for different representation of people's lives. Because, often, even in the more historical material

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where you have books written by women or about women, they tend to be because they've done something that's seemingly extraordinary. So it might be something like the first woman MP or someone

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involved in suffragette movement, which was quite a broad brush movement anyway but the people who get focused on or the leaders of that movement.

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And often, their histories are important and they're interesting, but we know about them because they were deemed to be different. They were deemed to be out of the ordinary.

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And so the ephemeral material that community organisations hold tend to tell, as I said, the history from the perspective of the community but not because someone's doing anything extraordinary but because people are living

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their lives. And often, when we're writing histories, particularly of women, particularly Black women, we focus on the extraordinary, on finding some difference.

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But these ephemeral materials help us to tell the histories of people just living their lives, doing what they need to do. And sometimes that is extraordinary,

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and sometimes that's very ordinary. And sometimes it's really painful, and sometimes it's difficult. And it's the histories of radicalism and politics

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of people fighting for change. But sometimes it's women-- I'd say, just being women, living their lives, organising birthday parties, organising childcare

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within their communities. And I think those histories are in a way the more radical because we get to find out how people live as people and not trying to create them as some kind of spectacle

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or some kind of, oh, well, they're only able to do that because they're extraordinary, or that's a woman who's doing-- that's a woman who's doing something extraordinary,

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but, you know, oh, but she's a woman. That's so different. But these histories where we can see people just living their lives realise how everyone is quite similar and how

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everyone does similar things and not to create a spectacle out of it. So I've been really interested in thinking, along with other researchers, about the creation of archives

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as a kind of care work. So, oftentimes, even if women aren't, as usual, listed as the founder or the most important person in the development of the archive,

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there will be many women who have been involved in the creation of archives generally through the Board of Trustees or of early people who came together to start, start, start

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the archives, particularly for the ones that I've been researching. And so I've been really thinking about the gendered aspect of care work but also how archives

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are a form of caring, how creating archives, filling gaps, filling omissions are to do with thinking about care as a form of love, a kind of a way of ensuring that the future generations

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understand their histories and thinking about it in this much more expansive way. I've also been really interested in thinking about how the material itself is looked after

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and how archivists can care for that material. And there's some really interesting research about feminist practises around archives, about how archives can help create empathy,

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how archives can help us to understand different communities, different people, and thinking about that as a broader way of thinking about care.

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And often, care is gendered. Often, care is seen to be women's work. So I'm really interested in how women have come together to create archives as a labour and a legacy of care but also

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how we can approach-- as heritage professionals, how we can approach archives with care, particularly around under-documented communities

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and under-documented histories, to make sure that we're not recreating some of those systems that caused the omissions and the gaps in the first place. So if we come to an archive and we

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may want to ask questions of, well, where are the women? Why don't we see them? What are the things that we can do? How do we fill those gaps?

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So thinking about that as a much broader collective kind of care, linking back to how people who form the archives in the first place, we're thinking about creating these legacies,

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creating these systems that meant that we had these archives, that we could tell these histories in the future.