Notes on the Black Awarding Gaps & Decolonisation Forum 2023: an open forum about the data, student experiences and ways forward – Part 3

After the panels, there were 3 workshops sessions run by the Access and Participation Plan Participatory Action Research Project (APP-PAR) group and a Roundtable Discussion led by Professor Jason Arday.

Workshop with APP-PAR Project students:

The students in the APP-PAR group facilitated three workshop sessions:

• Transition in and through university
• Decolonising teaching, learning, and assessment
• Intersections of race and mental health

Forum participants were asked to select a session at registration. Feedback from the workshops was shared during the Roundtable discussion and recommendations can be found here.

Notes on the Black Awarding Gaps & Decolonisation Forum 2023: an open forum about the data, student experiences and ways forward – Part 2

The next two panels focused on what is happening at Cambridge. The first panel focused on quantitative and qualitative data on the exprience of Black students in Cambridge. While the second panel looked at what individual groups are doing to decolonize the curriculum and make Cambridge more welcoming to Black students.

Reflections on Queens’ Legacies of Enslavement Project: Old Library Exhibition, ‘Enslavement and Salvation’

Queens' College old library BLOG

The University of Cambridge legacies of enslavement inquiry was instigated in 2019, in the wake of growing public interest in the issue of British universities’ historical links to enslavement. Yet this story of enslavement could not be told without input from the university’s colleges. It was partly with that in mind that a subsequent Queens’ Governing Body meeting invited the college’s librarians and historians to conduct an inquiry into Queens’ College’s legacies of enslavement.

John Ogilby, Africa: being an accurate description(London, 1670)[O.4.23]

Following much discussion between students and fellows, it was agreed that all interested Queens’ members would participate in a wide-ranging project to examine the biographies of as many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Queens’ members as possible. Given that it was not until the lockdown in March 2020 that work began, the library team drew up guidelines so that students, fellows and librarians could do the research from home…

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Obsolete orders: the need to reclassify Queens’ War Memorial Library

Queens' College old library BLOG

“I knew what it was like to want a book and to buy it, but I had forgotten what it felt like to amble among the library shelves, finding the book I was looking for but also seeing who its neighbors were, noticing their peculiar concordance, and following an idea as it was handed off from one book to the next, like a game of telephone. […] On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.”

Susan Orlean, The Library Book (Atlantic, 2019)

When librarians enthuse about classification systems to those uninitiated in the profession, there is not a small chance they will be met with words to the effect of “who cares?” Yet, as American journalist Susan Orlean reminisces, a reader with classmark in hand scanning library shelves for the matching letters and numbers from the catalogue they recently jotted down…

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