Techne Conflux: Rethinking Archival Research, Methods and Practice
Learning from the Black People’s Alliance
Professor Kirsten Forkert, Birmingham Institute of Media and English (BCU)
Thursday 12th January, 10.00-12.00 (G4, City Campus, Brighton and online)
This Techne session welcomes CMNH Visiting Research Fellow, Professor Kirsten Forkert.
This workshop presentation will explore Professor Forkert’s experiences of carrying out archival research on the Black People’s Alliance (BPA), which was a coalition of anti-racist organisations that formed in response to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, and brought together anti-imperialist, anti-racist and migrant justice movements. In studying the work of the BPA. Forkert is interested in examining what brought this coalition together, and also what caused it to come apart: processes which Stuart Hall has theorised as ‘articulation’ and ‘disarticulation’. In this presentation, Forkert will ask whether lessons can be learnt from the utopian aspects of the coalition: its bringing-together of campaigns an interests which, today, might be treated as separate and disconnected. Conversely, what can be learnt from the tensions that marked the organisation through its existence: between different constituent groups, between reformist and more radical positions held by these groups (particularly the associations with the Black Power movement)? Forkert will discuss plans to share the findings of this archival work with campaign groups, and to carry out reflexive discussions on the lessons learnt. She hopes to open up methodological questions about the use of archival research for reflexive discussions.
Speaker bio:
Kirsten Forkert is a researcher, teacher and activist. She is based at the Birmingham Institute of Media and English at BCU, where she’s also one of the Associate Directors of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Her work is based in Cultural Studies and engages with questions around migration and nationalism; her most recent project is the co-authored book, How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants (2020), which was based on a collaborative project with researchers and community organisations in the UK and Italy. She’s also on the editorial collectives of Soundings and Lawrence and Wishart Books. Kirsten is developing on new research around the transnational political imagination and migrant justice, and is interested in exploring the role of memory and history within the context of this work.
Lunch and refreshments are provided.
For further information about the programme’s events, contact: D.Madden2@brighton.ac.uk and r.rich@brighton.ac.uk
To book a place in person, please register here.
You can also join via Zoom, please register here. The Zoom link for online attendance will be sent ahead of the workshop on the day.
About the Conflux programme: the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories secured Techne funding for a Conflux programme that will address key methodologies and historiographies associated with archival research, practices and critical perspectives.
The archive’s authoritative status has come under increasing pressure across the arts and humanities in the last thirty years or so. This richly diverse programme of workshops will provide a framework to explore bigger questions about the ways in which the archive has been critiqued, problematised and de-centred in a range of academic disciplines, cultural contexts and professional settings.
Examining topics such as ‘living archives’, post-conflict community archives, AI and the archive, as well as what it means in practice to decolonise the imperial archive, the programme aims to highlight the extent to which differing approaches and methods can further enhance the generative possibilities of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives.
