Library Inclusion

Nearly there now!! On the one hand, hurrah!! But on the other hand...how did it take so long to get to this subject?! It's such a hot topic, I sort of feel like we should have covered it maybe a couple of weeks ago...

Venus Noire : black women and colonial fantasies in nineteenth-century France / Robin Mitchell

There's a notable lack of diversity in libraries, museums and Oxbridge.

I know of one, maybe two non-white librarians in the university, and one of them will be retiring this year! And the reputation of "pale, male and stale" precedes museums (we've had 3 different directors in the last decade, and all of them fit the stereotype).

Witnessing slavery : art and travel in the age of abolition / Sarah Thomas

The university is making small inroads into addressing the problem of lack of diversity in HE - Stormzy's scholarships are a big-name success, but there are little ones too, like the English Faculty Library had a "Twitter takeover" where students who aren't white discussed how they felt about the curriculum and what the lack of representation meant to them. And I've definitely seen an increase in the number of black students visiting the library over the years, so hopefully things are gradually starting to head in the right direction.

The Creative Case for Diversity is a good start - it's about building in ways of improving diversity to make them as embedded into museum practice as possible. To that end we're doing things like working with Magdalene Odundo, and getting other artists, particularly BAME artists, to engage with the museum's objects.

Boston's Apollo : Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent / edited by Nathaniel Silver

There's also the decolonialisation aspect of museums. One of the really meaningful exhibitions we had recently was one by Matt Smith: Flux: Parian Unpacked, which set a number of busts of 19th century figures against a backdrop of wallpapers featuring British atrocities - the Irish potato famine, the Opium Wars and the subjugation of India.

And it doesn't stop outside the library door! I've been working on our collection, trying to put together a number of resources for staff. The pictures are of some of the books in this collection. Obviously it's a work in progress, very much so, but you've got to start somewhere!

On decoloniality : concepts, analytics, and praxis / Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh