Bibliographic Activism: Researching Under-Represented Cultures and Lineages

This workshop is the third in the series Feminist Tools for Working Across Difference, the CHASE-funded PhD training programme organised across the Courtauld Institute, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and Sussex University, in collaboration with the FDRG.

The meeting includes presentations on methods of researching and mapping under-known writing, cultural production, and networks of friendship and solidarity, with a focus on the Anglophone Caribbean. It also introduces an emerging project designed to map East and South East Asian (ESEA) Feminisms.

Contributors Alice Corble, Alison Donnell, and Dot Jia Zhihan discuss the tools they have adopted, working across radical librarianship, literary scholarship, and curatorial practice, for narrating stories and lineages that fall outside dominant histories and cultures.  Methods explored include researching short-run, self-published, and non-commercial publications; delving into overlooked archives; conducting interviews and oral histories; and developing frameworks for co-research and co-creation.  Woven throughout presentations are questions of epistemic justice and restitution, representation and redress.

The workshop will include time for participants to share their own projects and ideas for researching under-known histories and genealogies.

Alice Corble, Postcolonial Library Legacies and New Transnational Maps of Learning. Exploring historical partnerships, social movements and contemporary connections linking Sussex University with The University of the West Indies (via University of London), Corble discusses the central yet often overlooked role of academic libraries and archives in shaping de/colonial processes and reparative reckonings in higher education, international development, and institutional memory. She will share emerging findings and speculative approaches to mapping these knowledge formations in multi-modal co-creative ways.

Alison Donnell, Bibliographic endurance and knowledge justice. Drawing on her work researching and recovering Anglophone Caribbean women writers for her book Lost and Found: An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean (Papilotte Press, 2025), Donnell argues that surfacing the extent of scattered publications outside the purview of commercial and metropolitan knowledge institutions is an important act of feminist restitution and knowledge justice.

Dot Jia Zhihan, Mapping ESEA Feminisms: decentralised archiving and cultural redress. By mapping the scattered histories of British East and Southeast Asian communities through a multi-nodal framework, Dot Jia Zhihan proposes that grassroots bibliographic intervention can foster new pedagogical empowerment within UK higher education as well as communities’ histories.

BIOS

Alice Corble is a transdisciplinary scholar-activist and educator whose praxis is grounded in the social and epistemic justice dimensions of libraries and archives. She is a Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London, and a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Sussex Centre for Rights, Reparations and Anti-Colonial Justice. Her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship titled ‘Postcolonial Library Legacies and New Transnational Maps of Learning’  examines libraries as infrastructural sites of power and knowledge via connected conjunctural case studies across Caribbean–British higher education. This project builds on her previous fellowship at University of Sussex Library, which explored the library's role in Sussex's history as the UK's first "new university" founded in 1961 with an academic and geopolitical mission to draw "a new map of learning" (Asa Briggs) in the aftermath of war and empire.

Alison Donnell is head of Humanities and Professor of Modern Literatures in English at the University of Bristol. She has published widely in the field of Caribbean literature, with significant contributions to the fields of literary history and culture, recovery research of women authors, and Caribbean literary archives. Her recent works reflect her ongoing commitment to exploring and expanding literary histories, including a special double issue of Caribbean Quarterly on Caribbean Literary Archives. Her latest monograph Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the literary imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean was published by Rutgers in 2021.

Dot Zihan Jia is a curator, editor, and translator who considers diasporic feelings as worldmaking and translation as close reading. She works as Curator (Studios & Residencies) at  Studio Voltaire,, London, and teaches on BAFA (Extension) at Goldsmiths and MAFA at Chelsea College of Arts. Dot also works on the advisory board of Saloon London, organises with the Feminist Duration Reading Group and edits bilingual magazine chán. Previous projects and collaborations have been with ICA London; Spike Island, Bristol; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Goldsmiths CCA, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong; The Mosaic Rooms, London. From 2022 to 2024, Dot was a curator at esea contemporary, in Manchester.

BOOKING ESSENTIAL!

You can reserve a free place here.

VENUE INFORMATION & ACCESS

The workshop will take place in RHB 142 in the Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London. Following introductory presentations, breakout discussion groups will take place in smaller spaces in the same building.  

Access info here. If you have any additional accessibility requirements or needs please contact feministduration@gmail.com

Image: Alice Corble, Postcolonial Library, collage (detail)