This year marked the sixth anniversary of the Race, Roots & Resistance Collective at the University of Manchester.
Formed in 2018, the Collective brings together staff, students and community members from across the North West who share a commitment to anti-racist research, teaching and action.
The last year has been a busy one, so lets take a look back at some of the highlights…
The Founders & Funders Exhibition
From 20 September 2023 through 23 March 2024, our student-led exhibition – Founders & Funders: Slavery and the building of a University (website) – was on display at the John Rylands Library.
The exhibition was curated by a team of postgraduates researchers employed by our Emerging Scholars Programme, including Nancy Adams, Faiza Azam, Jaden Haynes, Katie Haynes, Courtney Jones, and Jeevan Kaur Sanghera. It explored how profits from slave trading, ownership of enslaved people, and manufacturing with slave-grown cotton funded the cultural and educational development of the University of Manchester and wider city region. The students hope that the exhibition’s findings will serve as a resource for a more sustained, uninterrupted dialogue about how this history and its far reaching and destructive legacies should be addressed in the places we live, study and work. You can learn more about the exhibition and the students research on the Rylands Blog here.
Following on from the exhibition, Race, Roots & Resistance partnered with the John Rylands Research Institute and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre to host a series of public engagement activities…
In October, Nancy Adams joined Dr Matthew Stallard and the RACE Centre’s Harry Eyre in hosting a “Collections Encounter” that offered visitors a closer look at items relating to the Founders and Funders exhibition. These included McConnel and Kennedy’s order book, samples of raw and worked cotton from the Science and Industry Museum and archive materials from the RACE Centre. You can learn more about this event on the Global Threads blog.
In November, we hosted a special engagement activity for Global Majority students in which we toured the exhibition together before sitting down to share our reflections on the exhibition’s findings and our visions for reparative change.
In February, historian Linford Sweeney (Inspired Histories) led a bespoke workshop on Caribbean genealogy for African Caribbean community members at Manchester Central Library. Support was provided by Emerging Scholar Courtney Jones as well as Lianne Smith and Harry Eyre of the RACE Centre.
Emerging Scholar Sanghera presents at The Guardian Live Event
In June 2024, Jeevan Kaur Sanghera presented the Emerging Scholars’ collective research findings at The Guardian Live’s ‘Cotton Capital: Slavery and the University of Manchester’ event at the University of Manchester.
Hosted by the Universally Manchester Festival as part of the University’s bicentenary commemorative events, the expert panel featured Professor David Olusoga; Professor Uma Kothari from the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester; Maya Wolfe-Robinson editor of The Guardian’s Cotton Capital series, and Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice President for Social Responsibility. You can watch the event on the Universally Manchester event page.
Welcoming our new Emerging Scholars for 2024!
This summer we welcomed five new Emerging Scholars who will be working on a research collaboration with the Royal Exchange Theatre! The new team includes Beth Carson, Aimee Eggington, Moleka Newman, Destinie Reynolds, and Aashe Singh.
While today the Royal Exchange building is home to a theatre company, it was previously the site of a globally significant exchange dealing primarily but not exclusively in cotton and textiles. Student researchers will be supporting staff at the Royal Exchange Theatre as they conduct research into the Exchange’s connections to the transatlantic slavery economy and colonialism with an eye toward more accurately representing the buildings history in public narratives and engagement activities. Big thanks to our staff consultants and mentors, Dr Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza (Manchester), Dr Matthew Stallard (UCL Centre for the Study of British Slavery), Dr Jack Webb (Manchester) and Dr Alexia Yates (Manchester). Funding was provided by SALC Social Responsibility and the Student Experience Internship scheme.
R3 Undergraduate Research Symposium
To mark the end of the academic year we also hosted the fifth annual R3 Undergraduate Research Symposium at the University of Manchester!
Each year we host this event to celebrate research undertaken by undergraduate students in the Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects. The symposium’s mission is two-fold: to support Global Majority students undertaking research in any area and to support anti-racist research conducted by all students. As ever we had a very exciting line-up split across two panels. The first focused on ‘Race, Identity and Education in Britain’ and featured Ayman Mahmood (History), Destinie Reynolds (History and Spanish), Lily Collins (History), and Natasha Bassi (Sociology and East Asian Studies). Our second panel was titled ‘Ordering and Othering: Colonial and Racial Representations in the Wider World featuring Aashe Singh (History), Lily Thomas (History and Sociology), Amelie Cullen (Politics and Modern History), and Gosia Koroluk (French and Russian). Big thanks to all our student presenters and our convenors Dr Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza and Dr Kerry Pimblott.
‘Teaching Black History’ Summer Course
This summer, we partnered with local historian Linford Sweeney (Inspired Histories) as he delivered ‘Teaching Black History’, a six-week programme that aims to train a new generation of local Black (African and African Caribbean) educators in delivering Black history curriculum.
The programme is open to people who have taken an Inspired Histories course and have an interest in researching and teaching Black history within a community context or furthering their own studies in the subject.
Participants attended lectures and workshops every Saturday for six weeks where they developed their historical skills and field specific knowledge while working toward the development of an independent research topic.
The programme culminated with a Research Showcase at Manchester Central Library in late June with presentations delivered on a variety of themes including the history of resistance to racial inequalities in the education system and the Haitian Revolution. This project was supported by SALC Social Responsibility and Harry Eyre at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre.
Looking forward to more good work in 2024/25!
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