Teaching digitisation to combat cultural erasure: a roundtable discussion

Description

Teaching digitisation to combat cultural erasure: a roundtable discussion

Global majority and indigenous people often face cultural erasure through material colonialism. The creation of digital archives can provide ways for cultures which have been affected by this process to reach wider audiences and aid the dissemination of counter-narratives which challenge racist and colonial ways of thinking about the past. However, global majority and indigenous people are also likely to encounter additional challenges in learning the skills necessary to carry out digitisation projects on their own terms. 

This online roundtable will provide a space for the convenors and participants in a recent practical workshop in Cambridge teaching digitisation with the aim of broadening access to digitisation and archival methods to share their experiences with a wider audience of cultural heritage practitioners. Held in collaboration with the Sandbach Tinne Archive, the workshop equipped participants with skills that facilitate dignity and respect for one’s relation to heritage materials by using free/low-cost software and technology that is readily available for minimal standard reconstruction of 3-D objects and digitisation of documents and other 2-D archival material. 

The event is hosted by the Anti-Colonial Archives Working Group in collaboration with the Cambridge Data Schools. 

Speakers:

Adil Mian – a first-generation Pakistani-British muslim, their current practice focuses on environmental disaster mitigation in Pakistan, particularly developing ethical tools for flood mitigation, through collaboration with Cambridge University. They are also currently a facilitator within the ھ و (Ho) collective, which is working towards building regenerative communal practices between STEM and other fields.

Jendayi Omowale – a Caribbean-American filmmaker and writer focused on telling the narratives of those marginalised in the historical archive. She has worked for over four years as a journalist and has an MPhil in World History from Cambridge University, with her dissertation looking at the role of Kittitian and Nevisian plantation societies in the political and legislative policies of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Sara Sarshar – a practising immersive artist and activist, while actively being involved in Game Design. She is also the founder of y0uph0ria_, a platform attempting to uncover non-knowledge through creating digitised archives of the inner-experience, greatly associated with unknowable and unutterable histories of violence. The methodology of these spaces namely allows for the binding of a physical and virtual function, in hope of leading y0u to further knowledge in a post-truth era.    

Marta Musso – a historian with a specialisation in decolonisation, energy history, and methodologies for historical research in a digital environment, research manager at Archives Portal Europe 

Alda Terracciano – academic researcher, visual artist, curator, and activist, who has worked with diverse communities in Britain. In 2001 she co-founded Future Histories, the first independent archive of African, Asian and Caribbean performing arts in the UK, now based at Goldsmiths University, for which she curated ground-breaking cataloguing and digitisation projects and exhibitions. She is artistic director of Aldaterra Projects.

Dorothy Sebbowa – academic researcher with special interest in cultural heritage, decolonisation, slavery and digitals in the Global South. She was awarded the Sloane Lab Community Fellowship, currently based at Makerere University in Uganda.