Conversations in Social Justice:
Colonial Histories and Institutional Memory:
York St John University’s Historical Archive
Podcast transcript
Series 2. Episode 1.
Dr Adam Stock is joined by PhD researcher Amy McCarthy and Academic Services Manager Tom Peach to discuss their Students as Researchers project which explored documented, institutional colonial histories in York St John University’s Historical Archive. Together they explore historical pedagogy, colonial Christian Missionary work in Japan, India and Canada, and the complex implications for York St John as a social justice institution.
Adam Stock
Welcome to Conversations in Social Justice, the Institute for Social Justice podcast, Yorks St John University. I’m Dr. Adam Stock, Senior Lecturer in English literature.
Amy McCarthy
I’m Amy McCarthy, a second-year part time PhD student in the School of Humanities.
Tom Peach
And I’m Tom Peach. I’m Academic Services Manager in Library Learning Services, and I’m the carer for the Archives and Special Collections.
Adam Stock
This episode is all about why YJS institutional archives and a project which Amy led last academic year on the colonial history of York St University. The project began with discussions in a Teaching and Learning Community of Practice I’m involved in in the School of Humanities, which looks at issues around decolonization, and that’s a word we might possibly come back to later. We were keen to ask some questions about the history of our institution, which does not perform part of its current public narrative. In what ways was YSJ involved in the history of colonialism? And how might this affect or inform our current teaching and learning practice? What might accountability look like in terms of the benefits the institution might have accrued through colonialism. Working with Tom peach, and another community of practice, which specialises in interdisciplinarity, which is led by Dr. Alex Beaumont and Dr. Ben Garlic, we got a small pot of internal funding to support Amy to dig a little deeper in University Archives to see what sort of stories it might yield.
Adam Stock
Tom, what’s the scope of the university archive? To kick us off? And what state is it in from your pre existing knowledge what sort of things were you expecting or hoping we might find in it?
Tom Peach
So the University Archives stretches back till not just its formation in the 1830s but to around about a decade or so prior. So, the institutional archive contains any of the documentation that was selected to be kept from that time. So throughout the archive, it’s very much an administrative history. So the archive is full of things like admission records, it’s full of building meeting minutes, it’s full of academic board minutes, it’s full of financial records, full of things to do with the chaplain, full of things to do with accommodation, departmental meeting, minutes, all sorts of different kinds of things, things that were donated by past students. So we’ve got a lot of examples of past student work, we’ve got a lot of photographic history, both official institutional photography, and students of photography, lots of uniform, all sorts of different kinds of things, practice history. We had a official unqualified paid archivist up until about 2000. And since then, since that position was wasn’t really recruited to, the archive is being maintained by librarians, we do it on an additional basis. So we do it, in addition to everything else that we do. The archive, up until very recently was very much in a state that it was as of 20 years ago. So the catalogue was very much just in a both in a paper format and its digital format was basically just a very long HTML page, which wasn’t accessible. So it’s no longer a legal form that we can offer it in. But also, it’s not the most searchable, usable thing ever. So thinking about archives in kind of current day, it’s not particularly helpful or usable thing for archival research. Because it’s also historically has been in that format, it can be quite difficult sometimes to pull out narratives and make connections between records. So the past two years or so, I done a lot of work to transfer that old catalogue into a new searchable catalogue, so that it’s really easy to find things and also have been doing some kind of some modern day rights access things and as well, so data protection and so on. But from my work in the archive, I definitely know and have known since since arriving here, that the archive is actually quite a complex site of histories and not always a particularly nice set of histories either. So there’s lots of things in the archive which point to kind of racist histories we know a lot about from spoken oral histories from alumni that there’s lots of minstrelsy that occurred, you know, I found records of academic board discussing from the turn of the century discussing whether someone’s anti semitic beliefs would be enough to stop their money being used as a scholarship, they decided that it wasn’t, and there’s lots of student writing as well from their travels going all over the place. Students from the men’s college talking about going to the African continent and describing how much they needed the British intervention in terms education. There were some really, really difficult and problematic depictions and things occurring, but it’s not necessarily connected to each other. And we’ve never necessarily gone looking for that in the past. And certainly from my experiences, lots of the work that’s been done as certainly been around war work, and so on. So I knew that from my limited kind of explorations that there would be lots of potential narratives to explore the question was where to start, because there’s, you know, we’re nearing on 200 years worth of documentary history to explore. And again, from my perspective, it’s an additional part an extra add on to my role where in other institutions, it might be someone’s full time job. So yeah, very much approaching it with a there’s all this stuff. There’s always potential stuff that we could explore all these potential narratives. Where do we want to start?
Amy McCarthy
At the beginning of this project, I tried my best to have as few preconceptions as possible. Due to the pandemic and I wasn’t able to physically see the archives. And I understand from Tom that probably wouldn’t have helped me to understand the archives by physically seeing them. But Tom shared an amazing resource of the contents of the archives. So I found out about sort of the records of admissions, finances, etc, Introduction to the archives, and what is in. As my background is in literature, I was very interested in looking at language and particularly language around education, Tom had mentioned about alumni magazines, particularly the ones for York St John and Ripn and the entries about alumni doing missionary work. And so I came into this project, knowing that it was a so many amount of hours, it was a limited amount of hours that I wanted to try and find some sort of a narrative. So I decided to look at the magazines, in particular the Ripon College Association magazines, going into that I planned to analyse the language used around education when discussing teaching in say York or a local areas in Yorkshire and comparing that to the language use around education abroad. However, when doing that, I realised that’s not the case. And it wasn’t as simple as that. And as the project continued, I realised that it isn’t necessarily about people talking about education, when members have stuff in particular past alumni I was looking at were writing in the magazine about their time teaching abroad, they actually talked very little about the teaching, and more about the cultural side of things. And in particular, comparing places they went to. The examples I focused on were in Japan, India and Canada, it’s more sort of a sense of travel, writing, and a reading of the cultures in these places, rather than actually discussing education, which I found very interesting and it wasn’t quite what I expected.
Adam Stock
I think that was really interesting to me as well, because these narratives from alumni tended to serve it seemed to be a kind of promotional kind of material where they helped to get more York St John and Ripon College Alumni to apply these to these schemes, and some of them were government schemes were only like the League of Empire in particular had a scheme that allow people to go and exchange for a year. And I thought it was really interesting to see how the whole sort of architecture of the institution is set up to… that this is like it’s fully embedded. These aren’t just people going off on their on their holiday, you know, or going off to do a bit of travelling, a bit of backpacking, after they’ve done their degree, it’s it’s very much seen as a core thing that one might do with one’s degree afterwards. It’s pretty normalised to go off and work further the work of Empire, as the missionary teaching, all through secular teaching, or both, because they’re often quite implicated together.
Amy McCarthy
I definitely agree with that. In the Ripon College Association magazine, alongside accounts of missionary work in teaching abroad, there was a lot of entries about the importance of Christian teaching, of church teaching, and the importance of that role is expanded into these narratives about teaching these in other countries, and that is something you need to question and problematize.
Adam Stock
Definitely, I think it speaks something maybe about the I mean, there’s an elephant in the room here, which is that we are on the Institute for Social Justice podcast, and we’re talking about YSJ as an institution that is interested in social justice, and it’s very much in its brand values. It’s very much in its you know, as Tom says it’s sort of corporate history. But I think there is this need to engage in some of these complexities here, which perhaps I don’t know, what you think Tom is perhaps speaks to some wider issues in higher education about the way that we see oppression and discrimination that perhaps isn’t just common to York St John, but he’s very much embedded in the history of higher education and teacher training in this country.
Tom Peach
Yeah, I think when we looked, you know, examples over the past couple of years of, you know, people raising complaints, with their institutions about risks about sexual harassment, all sorts of kinds of oppression, is that our system is often very much set up to individualise oppression and discrimination and to work on clear demonstrable examples of things which are racist, for example. And certainly, you know, when raising these kinds of concerns that I was having with the archive, that was one of the first things you know, I was asked. Well, you know, are there some clear examples, and whilst we do have some clear examples given to us by alumni, and obviously, I’ve found some examples, I was particularly interested, which is why Amy’s work has been so interesting, is actually looking much more nuanced and connected about oppression, and how does it work through systems? So, you know, what is the impact of the institution’s values, and the way that the institution is set up? You know, as a Christian missionary college, what does that mean for the values that are espoused? What does that mean for how things are taught? What does that mean for how those values expand beyond the walls of the building here on Lord Mayor’s Walk, and I think it can be very easy to generalise social justice and to collapse into simplify those complexities. So for example, to say that we’ve been in a social justice institution since its conception, which is true, in some sense, we’ve definitely been a social justice institution for opening up education for women, for opening up education to working class people, but there are certain axises of oppression that are not expressed in that understanding of social justice. So for example, it’s only education for certain kinds of women and certain kinds of working class people. So for example, people who came to us in the early 1800s, a good rating of Good Standing from their Church of England church, they had to go on. And you know, in teaching certain kinds of institutions, they had to believe certain kinds of things. You know, we have records of teachers here being reprimanded for teaching the wrong type of Christianity, for teaching the wrong strands of things, branded as heretics. You know, we’ve got a plaque on our campus and dedicated to the Cruse sisters, here are three sisters who were really quite harshly reprimanded for the type of Christianity they were teaching here, you know, handing out materials that were deemed heretical. So, you know, we can recognise the institution’s value in uplifting certain kinds of people, but also trace that back, you know, through history to present data to understand that it’s a much more complex picture that would have been good for some people, and not others. And in particular, through within what’s been interesting through Amy’s work is exploring how that is actually quite an international story of Christian missionary work and our understanding of global englishes Global Education and Christianity and Christian values across the globe. So it’s actually it’s the social justice narrative is actually incredibly, incredibly complex.
Adam Stock
I think you’re absolutely right. It’s a good time, I think to be having these conversations. I know that there is, you know, the leadership at YSJ, particularly Susan Orr, or who’s our Pro Vice Chancellor for teaching and learning is keen to have these sorts of difficult and uncomfortable conversations. But this seems like I think a good point to segue into talking a little bit about Amy’s paper that she wrote for the Learning and Teaching conference that was convened in part by Susan Orr over the summer, because as one of the outputs of this work in the archive, Amy, you wrote this paper for a Teaching and Learning Conference and you transcribed huge amounts of archival material from the late 19th, early 20th century. So I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about the sorts of documents you decided to focus on and why,
Amy McCarthy
As I stated earlier, I decided to focus on the Ripon College Association magazines. I particularly looked at the magazines from the years 1897 to around 1935. And then I narrowed that down to about 10 years between the ages of 1915 and 1925. And I’ve explored a couple of narratives within those magazines. I was interested in looking at missionary work abroad. So I began this work by just creating a table of contents and understanding what is in each magazine and I wanted to particularly find maybe like one voice or a couple of voices that appear in the magazines quite a lot and are regular contributors. And I found that an alumni Mary Manda who was a previous member of staff at Ripon College from the 1897 to 1915. And Mary Manda regularly contributed to the magazine to write about the importance of church teaching, the importance of Sunday schools, she would write up about the external events that students would partake in. But in 1915, she actually left Ripon College and moved to Japan. And she worked there as a teacher and educator until about 1934. So she was sort of my hook for this research. And I followed her narrative and her career throughout the magazine. And I found it interesting how Manda really saw the important of an evangelical education and had concerns about changes in education in Britain. And then it was quite interesting following her move to Japan and specifically her specialising in teaching Bible studies in Tokyo. What I found interesting about her entries was that detail about her time living and working in Japan, but seem to have made very little progress on learning in language and embracing the culture. Everything in Manda’s writing centres still be very Eurocentric, whilst looking at Manda’s narrative I compared to another regular contributor called Miss Mary Whitaker. So after exploring Mary Manda’s work, I also noticed another regular contributor to the magazine called Mary Whittaker, who was also a member of staff at Ripon College at a move to Ranchi in India in 1913. And I found her narrative very interesting to compare to Mary Manda’s, as they had such similar career path. However, the difference with Mary Whittaker was that she did try and embrace the community she became a part of she tried to learn Hindi. However, looking at her narrative India as it stands in the magazine, she does begin to mention even that English is the primary language for education in Ranchi. But she doesn’t challenge it, which I found very interesting. So, when creating the conference paper for the conference, I decided I wanted to explore some case studies in the magazine to give a test of how international York St John actually is in how far our alumni actually went and so the final place I looked at was Canada. So the difference with Canada was that I couldn’t find a regular contributor. So I could not find in the pieces that I looked at anybody who had stayed in Canada. However, I did find a couple of alumni who visited most likely on a yearly scheme or scholarship, which we could get into later. And in my conference paper, I decided to focus on three missionaries in three different colonies and see how they discuss their experiences of teaching in these countries. And ultimately, it was very clear they all spoke very little about actually being teachers, being educators and in many of them that seemed like it was a holiday, like it was an encouragement to you should also go to teach and take this opportunity to travel, take this opportunity to immerse yourself in different cultures, take this opportunity to immerse yourself in different cultures. However, not really understand the importance of communities, their histories of the places you attend.
Adam Stock
You make it sound almost like the sort of classic stereotype of the gap year, the sort of people going on their travels, not taking it too seriously. But at the same time, they are doing some serious work because they’re promoting missionary work. They’re encouraging the expansion of Empire. And I wonder if we might talk a little bit more about the way that they promoted evangelical Christian work from you know, from Miss Manda in Japan or,
Amy McCarthy
As I said, these entries did read a little bit like travel writing, which I found quite shocking. These magazine entries did read like pieces of travel writing, which I did find quite shocking. Upon further reading and research, ultimately, missionary work in the late 19th and 20th century does play a key role in the Imperial process and although missionary societies connections to colonialism are not explicitly referenced in the Ripon College Magazine entries that I’ve studied, they are part of that narrative and they do promote the expansion of Empire in particular the British Empire. To look at certain example of that would be Miss Mary Manda in in Tokyo and in particular her Bible study classes. She makes a comment about the textbook she uses and in Miss Manda’s Bible classes, she is using British Eurocentric textbooks. And so she says, for example, that the students reading English easily and are longing to copy the English and American women students about whom they read. And it’s that promotion of Britishness and westernisation, that is at the core of these these classes, which again, is not problematized. She also states that, you know, these books have to be in English, because Christianity, and particularly at that point in history in new early 20th century isn’t one of like, it’s one of the minority religions in Japan, and so there was little translated work into Japanese and she states that there isn’t anybody appropriate to translate these works. So using English texts, and again, Miss Mary Whittiker in India says exactly the same towards the end of her entries in India as I studied she didn’t do originally in her entries and she states that she acknowledges the use of English is arbitrary but she states it has had advantages. Whittaker quotes that the lack of books in the vernacular suitable for study and that one language should be chosen to be understood over the whole of India and that one language that she deems seems to be appropriate is English. And again, it’s there is no question about well, why English, why the language that needs to be the primary language for education and ultimately to have English as a primary language for education is rooted in Empire and the expansion of the British Empire.
Tom Peach
I think exploring some of the language as you have done it’s been so interesting and specifically looking at Miss Manda’s exploration of church teaching. You know, she talks about their their religious teaching that they’re giving them is too indefinite and vague, our lessons are moral rather than definitely religious. “We are so afraid of reproach of narrow mindedness, that we dare hardly give a lesson on the distinct doctrines of the church and many of our children grow up with beliefs are vague and nebulous that they are merely the natural introduction to scepticism and infidelity.” In such a short paragraph you get a real sense about the framing and the purpose and how they have come to understand countries, any peoples who are not within the Christian tradition that you know, if you’re not in the Christian church, that is the understanding that you know that so afraid of reproach or the narrow mindedness, they would arrive there really not anticipating the fact that people may not want to learn, particularly you know, about Christian doctrine, that they might not want to learn Christian Western morals, it speaks very much to that idea of Empire and of Britain being the kind of the, you know, the domineering gift giving society to the rest of the world. So I think, you know, this, this linguistic research that you’ve done with, you know, these narratives gives us so much rich data about the attitudes and the approach and the kinds of things that were going on. So it’s been a really interesting exploration that you’ve done for us.
Adam Stock
You know, I think there’s all sorts of ways we could connect this to broader research in British Empire and sort of things that were going on, I was really interested in the way that you picked up on the monetary system that Miss Whittaker used in India, which itself was quite controversial. Even in the 19th century, there was some controversy over whether a guy called Dr. Bell or someone called Lancaster was in fact, the true inventor of it. And they took systems already in place in Madras then kind of adapted them and appropriated them, particularly for use in schools, whose pupils were often pupils that were in a way the product of Empire ie the product of men who had gone out to serve the Empire and had children with local women, whether consensually or not, and it’s really interesting. So Sara Ahmed, who I know Tom Peach, a big fan of as well as myself, writes a bit about this in her most recent book, What’s the Use, and she says, this long quotation from James Mill who’s a utilitarian thinker he was best buds with Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, and Mill is talking about Dr. Bell’s work in Madras in India, and he says that this school had been appointed at that settlement in Madras for most unjustly degraded and ill used race of beings, the calf cast children of Europeans by the East India Company, which has acted with more of beneficence intention towards its subjects during the period of its sovereignty than any other government during that period on the face of the earth, but whose beneficent intentions from uncontrollable cause have almost always been defeated by its agents abroad. So Mill’s kind of seeing these pupils of Miss Whittaker would be perhaps dealing with us, you know, in these very racialized terms as the horrible 19th century term half caste, he’s talking about them as a resource that is underused by Empire. And if we can better educate these children, they can be made to serve the Empire a little bit better, and not be sort of a drain and this sort of weird sort of group of what he would see as kind of a mongrel race in 19th century racial terms, really does strike to the heart of the kind of racialization of Empire, I think, and the problems with it.
Tom Peach
So interesting to resist the temptation to view this as a thing which is historical, a thing which happened, you know, 150 years ago, that it’s something that’s in the institution’s past, that has no connection to the present. You know, we spend so much of our time doing race equality charters, we spend so much time doing Athena Swan, and all these different kinds of things, which look obviously very much about the present. They look at, you know, widening participation, all these different kinds of stuff. But it’s often without any sort of connection to the trajectory of things from from the past, I think it’s being able to see these connections and have really honest conversations about our institutions, about their histories, about what they were part of, what broader systemic projects they were part of, and how they link to the very real present circumstances of many, many different marginalised communities. And that, you know, you can draw direct trajectories from the activities of our institution, hundreds of years ago, and whilst we’re in the middle of yet another culture war, there will no doubt there will be some reactionary people who have listened to this and accused us of cancelling people from 100 years ago, it’s really important for us to kind of push back on that sort of narrative, it’s not about cancelling, it’s not about holding people to standards that we have today. It’s about having honest conversations about the realities of lives for many people, you know, across the globe right now, and connect those to our institution’s histories and have those conversations about what that means about our own activities, about the ways that we approach stuff, but about the way that we tell our history as well. So I think you know, this really important lines to keep connected to these narratives.
Adam Stock
I absolutely agree. That’s why it’s so important that the work we’ve done, as well as archival research on that, you know, Amy’s been looking at the original sources that leave no doubt as to the sorts of things that were going on. And I wonder if actually, one point where we might draw this line from past or present is in relation to work on visitors to Canada. One of the findings, I think, made a real impact on the audience, when you gave your paper in July, was your discussion of a teacher who went on the League of Empire scheme for the interchange of teachers with the colonies in 1920s. And she went to Canada, and this was in July this conference. So it was a week after hundreds of graves of indigenous children had been found in the grounds of some former residential schools. And I know they’re still excavating other residential schools at the moment. So I wondered if we could talk a little bit about those schools in case our listeners don’t know about this, the scheme that the alumnus in question Miss Rawlinson goes on, and how First Nations people are presented in that. Yeah, could you tell us a little bit about that, Amy?
Amy McCarthy
Yes, of course, so in my presentation, I focused on one alumni named Ethel Marston who applied for the League of Empire scheme for the interchange of teachers with the colonies. So this scheme and schemes similar to this allowed British teachers to spend 12 months in the selected dominion, taking the place of a colonial teacher who in return, would spend the year teaching in place of the British teacher. So in the particular example I use in my conference paper, Miss Ethel Marston went to Canada for a year to teach. She doesn’t explain anything more about the teaching scheme except what the actual teaching scheme was. She ends up creating a six page entry about her time in Canada yet only two sentences of that actually are about the teaching she did. Marston writes, “Professionally little is to be gained from an exchange with a Canadian teacher. Canadian methods seem to be much behind those of our country.” So Marston’s example was a perfect example of how the Ripon College Association magazines missionary entries were pieces of travel writing and she ends her piece with the line Canada’s essentially a land of sunshine, sunshine that is reflected in the warm hearted hospitality of its people and their happy lives. When reading that I felt deeply uncomfortable, especially when I delivered the conference paper in July, what had been happening in the recent weeks prior to that conference, Marston’s words are just so privileged and as I said in my paper just shows like privilege of the coloniser to be able to say that this is a land of sunshine and how brilliant of a time she had. And although this didn’t make my paper, but I had focused on another alumni named Miss Rowlandson. And she created an entry for the College Alumni Magazine in 1915, called a visit to an Indian Reservation. And in that entry, it’s unclear how long she was in Canada for however, she was certainly there for a few months. It states in the entry she was near Montreal, and she visits a school there. And when reading the entry and also knowing the history of Montreal and entered the indigenous communities there I started to realise what exactly the school is and also do further investigation into the areas that Miss Marston worked in. She worked in Brantford, Ontario. And these are the locations of some Canadian residential schools. These schools, the Canadian residential schooling system was essentially a boarding school and then there to summer day schools for Indigenous children to go to. By the 1920. attendance at these schools were compulsory for Indigenous children and missionaries were brought to the day and residential schools with a clear emphasis on Christianising and Canadianising the indigenous children there. And the Christianization and Canadianisation of indigenous communities not only involves an erasure of indigenous culture, but as we know, these schools have been reported for the abuse and trauma they have placed on their students. And this is recent history, the last of these schools closed in around 1979. So you know, within the last 50 years, and although the research that I have done so far doesn’t give us solid evidence that alumni from York St John had taught at these schools, they certainly did visit them with Miss Rowlandson’s entry as a prime example of that. And once I figured that out, and I had research that I found that deeply unsettling, and I think is something that if I had more time, I would definitely investigate further, because I think that is something that our university needs to have a conversation about, and try and understand what our connection is to that, because there certainly is a connection to ourselves the Canadian residential schooling system.
Adam Stock
Definitely, I think what’s quite interesting is actually those silences. It’s not that nothing happened, because they didn’t talk about, it’s what space does that silence hold. So if they’re talking about Canada as a land of sunshine, having gone through the winter in Montreal, we can get down to minus 40 degrees or more, you know, to be talking about it as a land of sunshine, and not to be talking about indigenous peoples, except as a kind of note of local colour, I think itself is revealing. And I definitely think there’s work to be done here, perhaps alongside working with other similar institutions. York St John is a cathedral group university, there I think, was 15, or 16 Cathedral group universities, all of which have histories as educators, teachers, and there’s there’s work potentially to be done with archives in former colonies as well. And the other thing that I just add is, of course, until 1931 laws about Canada were made in the UK, it’s only in 1931 that the Canadian Parliament becomes the sort of prime legislature for all laws in Canada, which means that we have a connection both institutionally but also being within Britain as a former colonial power that was very much in charge there at the time that you’re looking at. So we talked a lot then about a whole range of different areas that you looked at Japan, Canada, India, we’ve talked a lot about the monatorial system about the really wide variety of activities going on both secular and missionary in particular. I wonder if we can sort of bring this back to present as a way of wrapping up. What does this research mean for us now, here? What do you think it means to us? Tom, would you like to say something first,
Tom Peach
For me coming from a background where my professional experience is all about information. It’s about records. It’s about documented stuff. What it means for me is that just in this, the amount that we’ve discovered in this short project shows me just how many more narratives there are to follow. It shows me how much more there is to uncover to help us build and add on to this story, when I say story, but stories is the wrong word I think, I think sticking to narrative history is much better. It helps to show that we’ve got such a bigger piece of work to do to continue to explore, joining those narratives together, which helped to either fill the silences that we currently have, or to explore what the silences are. Archival history is very much about not only exploring what has been documented, but to understand what hasn’t, and why it hasn’t been documented. And you know there are so many different lines of inquiry that that bring us back to the present, that bring us back to our current circumstances, thinking about this institution and its purpose of teacher training, we get a very clear sense about the trajectory of who was meant to be a teacher, and who did we want to be teachers, what to do once we’re teaching and what has been the impact of that across the years? And how do we connect that to current circumstances of real marginalised people right now? And what does that mean then about how we support those communities? You know, York St John is very much about community, it’s very much about supporting York and supporting the area, but it’s also about creating opportunities for marginalised people. But I think that there is some work that we can do to connect that to our history, so that the work that we’re doing for marginalised, well, I say far, but within far and with marginalised people, is connected to our role as part of oppression in the past, I think it can be easier to keep those two separate things rather than seeing them as part of our trajectory. And as part of our reparations for the institution’s roll in the kinds of things we’ve explored.
Amy McCarthy
Even though this was a short project, I learned so much, and what I know, I only scratched the surface with this, I do think this is something that everybody in York St John could be involved with, staff and students. This is to spread the importance of using our archives and understanding our archives, in order to understand the York St John’s history and how our history is connected to our present. I believe that with this, we could go on to host further student researchers, inspire dissertation topics, feed into further discussions, and reflect on teaching policies and practices within the institution. And I think as well, with this, there’s a lot more to be done, we’ve only just opened a little bit of the conversation, there’s so much more to uncover. And I think it’s really important that everybody in the university continues to work on this.
Adam Stock
100%. I absolutely agree. To that end, I think it’s one of the important things that we have uncovered here is just this, as Tom says, the sheer range of histories and narrative history that there is in the archive that we could be using a lot more. And that could be as you say, it can be a key part of our teaching and learning, certainly in the humanities, but in other schools as well, we could think about how these, the history of our institution connects with those subject areas. Everything from sports, in the history of sports in the university, through the history of arts and music and education of course. I think it also points to the fact that to use this archive, we have to resource it and take care of it. And we’re really privileged that Tom does such a good job. And I know though that it is, he said an add on, it’s an extra and we’re really grateful for it and it would be great if we can continue to support it as an institution as much as possible.
Adam Stock
So that’s it from me. And I think from all three of us, thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this episode of the Institute for Social Justice podcast. I’m Adam Stock with me it’s been Amy McCarthy and Tom Peach and we’ll say goodbye for now.