Inclusive Collections, Inclusive Libraries is an RLUK programme of events that aims to foster conversation around decolonisation and inclusive practice in collecting, describing, presenting, and engaging with content in research library collections. It seeks to raise awareness about the opportunities and challenges of dealing with, contextualising, and engaging with offensive collections while also identifying and sharing examples of
Libraries, Research and ‘Community’: The Fitba Research Club
Thursday 5 June, 14:00 – 15:00 (BST), 15:00 – 16:00 (CEST/SAST), 16:00 – 17:00 (EEST), 06:00 – 07:00 (PDT), 0900 – 10:00 (EDT), 21:00 – 22:00 (AWST/CST)
As part of their efforts to decolonise practices and develop more inclusive, diverse and representative collections, cultural heritage bodies often work and think in terms of community. Typically this involves identifying communities that are underserved and under-represented, and exploring ways of working with them more closely, often through co-creation and co-curation projects. This approach informs much important, valuable work, and ‘community’ has become a largely uncontested term, used across the sector and generally treated as transparent.
But community is more complicated, prickly and elusive, in both theory and practice, than we often pretend. Among other issues, its embrace by cultural heritage bodies can sometimes result in its functioning as a mechanism of containment, even cultural ghettoisation: while superficially included, minoritised communities can find themselves held at arm’s length from anything like a public sphere, national discourse, or a meaningful place in national cultural institutions.
This presentation uses an introduction to Fitba Research Club: Andrew Watson’s Legacies – a prizewinning co–curated community research project run at the National Library of Scotland in 2023/24 – as a way of thinking through some of the challenges and opportunities of ‘community’ for research libraries and other cultural institutions. The project brought together a team of young adult community curators from minoritised communities to explore the story of Scotland’s – and the world’s – first Black international football captain, to develop research skills and information literacy, and to research and celebrate the rich history of sporting achievement by Black people and people of colour in Scotland. Through a critical look at the project’s successes and shortcomings, this talk explores questions about the implications of approaching inclusivity and decolonisation predominantly in terms of ‘community’; about the role of libraries in facilitating and actively constructing new research communities; and about what it might mean to think of community as something that implies and requires a distinctive coming together of commonality and difference.