December 2021 Newsletter

Aleph Ross is an MA student in Contemporary History and Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, 2021-2023.

She currently works part time for a charity supporting unpaid carers and has an interest in the history of social reproduction and attempts to organise groups who perform the hidden or neglected work of care, domestic and sexual labour. She is also curious about the absorption of this work into the welfare state, and the role of feminist groups and trade unions in shaping how gendered labor is performed and paid for.

Meanwhile, she has developed a growing curiosity in Jewish migration to London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is eager to explore the points of overlap between this period of history and the feminist and gender histories with which she is most familiar (e.g.moral panics about the trafficking of migrant Jewish women in the East End). One day a week, she also works as a cheesemonger in an outdoor market and is involved in organising with the community union ACORN.

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December 2021 Newsletter

Rebecca (Bex) Shorunke is an MA student in Culture, Diaspora and Ethnicity at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has just begun her studies and is interested in challenging the Eurocentric frameworks through which we have been taught to regard history, and exploring the contributions of discourses and movements, including coloniality, Enlightenment, Eugenics and fascism, in determining what we now regard as ‘race’.

She is also interested in exploring the relationship between sex and race. This will help her gain a deeper understanding into queer theory and the interactions between race, sexuality, gender, disability and class with the criminal justice system and wider society. And within that, the merging of race and sex to create ethnosexual borders that include and exclude certain groups to create patterns of hypersegregation around the world.

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December 2021 Newsletter

Annie Olaloku-Teriba is starting a PhD in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research is driven by two very simple questions: How is ‘race’ made by us today? And how, in turn, does ‘race’ make us?

She is particularly interested in constructing a conceptual history of ‘blackness’, tracing how our thinking about this category has changed in the last sixty years and the different social worlds that various approaches to ‘blackness’ imply. She investigates how the languages of race available to us are shaped by the specific material conditions of our society, and then in turn, how these languages of race shape not just how we think about race – but what possibilities there are to liberate ourselves from it. She is passionate about finding ways to make liberatory thought accessible to all.

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Zehra Miah is a PhD student at Birkbeck. Her work considers the impact of religious, racial, and ethnic labels on Turkish-speaking migrants in Britain in the twentieth century.

Support from the Bonnart Trust has meant that I have been able to study and research full-time for the first time in my academic journey. I’d completed my BA and MA part-time due to work and caring responsibilities. No longer would research activity be relegated to annual leave and the odd weekend when I was able to secure childcare.

I knew that researching Turkish-speaking migrants in Britain would mean prioritising oral history as a methodology. Turkish speakers seldom appear in the archives of migration scholarship and I was very much looking forward to my new status as ‘historian’ and delving into the sort of archival work I had only dreamt of; days (or weeks) sitting at the Hackney Archive in Dalston or in Kew flicking through files, scrolling through miles of microfilm piecing together the Turkish speaking experience.

I was nervous about starting the interviews so had put that off. And then, Covid.
The archives made great efforts to help researchers, particularly with digitising collections or making already digitised collections more freely available. Sadly, this (whilst greatly appreciated) was not very productive when researching marginalised groups who are almost invisible in the archives; hidden between the lines of long council minutes and newspapers and, only available on microfilm and large Cabinet papers.

The pandemic reiterated what the literature had told me – that Turkish speakers were ‘silent’ and ‘invisible’. As archives and libraries reopen with booking processes and limits to ensure fair access, I have had to rethink my archival practice. Gone are the hours of speculatively calling up file after file.

However, I am an eternal optimist and for me, there have been some positives in being forced to reevaluate my approach. When you have two hours to collate as much as you can it really focuses the mind. The very helpful archivist who kindly showed so much interest in my work when I got back to the Hackney Archives, helpfully pointed out that I might like to identify key dates before I tackled the non-digitized Hackney Gazette. I’d put off starting my interviews before the pandemic because I was nervous. Now, there is a sense of urgency because it has really hit me that (i) this work does not exist, (ii) this group is marginalised, (albeit with some privilege), and (iii) this really is an important intervention in the scholarship of migration in Britain.

Ultimately, I think what I am saying is that maybe all this upheaval has made me a better scholar.

The blog article, co-authored by Victoria Redclift (former Bonnart scholar) and Kusha Anand, seeks to highlight how the pandemic has brought to our attention pre-existing inequalities in healthcare and economics within British Bangladeshi communities.

Read the entire article on the Institution of Education blog.