This panel explored the role digital technologies (i.e internet, social media etc etc) has on public history as a profession and discipline. With much of my work conducted through online presentations and digital articles, ‘digital technologies’ is very much something I can speak on.
Roundtable: ‘Public History and the Digital Turn’, University of York
Chair: Esther Wilson (PhD Researcher at University of York)
In conversation with Holly Nielsen (PhD Researcher at Royal Holloway), Dr Hannah Ishmael (Archivist at Black Cultural Archives), Dr Ayshah Johnston (Learning and Engagement Manager, Black Cultural Archives), and Dr Chris Tuckley (York Archaelogical Trust).
Following March 2020, the UK population became increasingly dependent on online platforms. Meetings that were once scheduled to be face-to-face were now being held through online conferencing platforms including Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Post-lockdown, the digital world in some spaces has remained as a viable option to hold events, including my work where I still deliver online lectures – where at all possible I will do hybrid events. And whilst some prefer in-person events, keeping online available is equitable with those of us that are disabled, also in many cases enjoying the hybrid model as a form of accessibility.
In this panel, we discussed public history in the digital world, including how the pandemic impacted how we worked as historians and academics.
Neurodivergent While Black: Pronged by the Academy, Race Reflections
In this paper, Tré uses his collective prior expriences as a student, university staff, and student union staff in the higher education sector to talk about navigating university spaces as an autistic/dyspraxic Black male in the white neurotypical academy.
Dyspraxia, otherwise known as developmental coordination disorder (DCD), is a neurological development neurotype that impacts coordination among other things. Having consciously carried it since childhood, Tré’s experience of dyspraxia while Black accompanied him into higher education when he did his BA and MA degrees, and now partway through a PhD too.
ABSTRACT: ‘In the first year of his undergrad, Tré also found out he was autistic, while racism and misogyny in healthcare for example continue to act as barriers to diagnosis. Since, he has identified as neurodivergent, which has not always been safe with ableism from all sides – including being from other Black and Brown people.
What bell hooks called ‘imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy’, also applies to navigating neurotypical white academia. Whilst we know HE to be a racist structure, discourses to “neuroableism” (Feliz, 2020; Sanctuary Publishers, 2020) are not so widespread.
As a neurodivergent person racialised outside of whiteness, for him this is an interesting yet violent paradox. Particularly as an undergrad, neuroableism was not only common in his student group, but also featured in his encounters with academic staff.
In his experience, there seethed a poisonous human concoction, an atmosphere and culture of violence where students that think, be, and communicate ‘different’ are made into problems. This ethos infected his experience so much he avoided many seminars towards the end of his degree.
In this paper, via autoethnography, he plots his experiences to navigating neurotypical white academia, both from a student and staff perspectives.
Inspired by a prior MA dissertation of the same name, this paper discusses the UK’s 1919 Uprisings, Black soldiers during the First World War, and their absence from the school history curriculum.
Having grown up and lived in the UK all his life, it was for impossible Tré to ignore how the First World War is an intrinsic part of how Britain see itself.
But whilst the British state has marked lots of its centenaries, rarely has it marked those in the interwar years. However, the year 2019 marked 100 years since the 1919 Uprisings, an early example of street-level racist violence in Britain in no less than nine seaports, including Liverpool with the Murder of Charles Wotton and further killings in South Wales.
Via his experiences of the private education system and last year’s (2020) Black Lives Matter resurgence, in this paper Tré uses autoethnographic storytelling to analyse how today’s “Black Lives Matter” chants may apply to the lives of Black Britons over 100 years ago.
