4.2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK & RESEARCH QUESTIONS

4.2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK & RESEARCH

QUESTIONS

Fig 2. Conceptual framework collage (Source: Authots/Sheffield City Council Archive)

Counter Archiving Sheffied

Understanding the connections between diasporic geographies and living heritage led to the initial guiding research questions that informed our approach and methodology to the Practice Engagement:

• How can identity and sense of belonging be fostered within diasporic geographies in Sheffield?

• How can individual and collective identity be reconciled within diasporic geographies in Sheffield?

• Within diasporic groups in Sheffield, how has memory been transferred and transformed through time, place, and interpretation?

The memories, connections, and contributions of the African-Caribbean diasporic community in Sheffield have not been included in traditional forms of archives or even documented by the community members themselves prior to the BAP. One way to work against this erasure and exclusion is to challenge, contest, and expand such conventional archives through alternative forms of knowledge, such as counter-archives and counter-narratives (Brusius, 2019; Ketelaar, 2009).

Counter-archives question what information is valued, what knowledge is preserved or discarded, which voices craft narratives, and how history can be inclusively written (Trouillot, 2015). They also play a greater role than only documenting the past as a form of physical storage or as part of academic research; they enable community members to explore and conceptualise their (hi)stories and memories in the co-creation of an archive and can be integrated into the spaces the communities represent (Barraza, Garcia and Zipperer, 2018; Ketelaar, 2009). As such, counter-archives can take a multiplicity of forms, and their documentation goes beyond a single scale,

generation, or representation.

Connected to community and decolonial archives in the search for a community of memory and giving due credit (Ghaddar and Caswell, 2019; Ketelaar, 2009), counter-archives can document diasporic storytelling of living heritage, or the retelling of myths, acting as “catalysts for change” and as “a new imagination of alternatives” (Sandercock, 2003, p. 26). Storytelling is a method by which community members, as storytellers themselves, assemble and relay their (hi)stories of belonging within a diaspora. This can be done in various forms of media and communication. Further, counter-archives reflect translocality in their reflection of the continuous, multiscalar, and non-linear relations and flows of memories and stories between communities and their diasporic geographies, fundamentally connecting various localities and people at different times and of different generations. Therefore, memories, (hi)stories, and narratives are continually preserved, constructed, and reconstructed, as are the meanings of home and belonging (Halbwachs, 1992; Ketelaar, 2009).

Counter-archives like the BAP allow diasporic people to situate their spatial agency, have their contributions visible and recognised, have their experiences validated, and tell stories in their own words as their truths, recognising and reconfirming individual members’ identities and memories, as well as those of the collective diasporic community.

It changes the value system of information, acknowledging the journey through time and space, creating space for the quotidian experiences as lifetime contributions to the creation of place and community. Building on the work done by the BAP team and this conceptual framework of diasporic geographies, namely the African-Caribbean community in Sheffield, telling their own journeys to be documented in a counter-archive as a means to make their memories, (hi)stories, and living heritage throughout time recognised, the following design research question will be investigated:

• How can the Bantu Archive Programme become a tool to further the recognition of the African-Caribbean community’s living heritage in Sheffield?

Ketelaar (2009) presents the idea of the living archive as a contestation to the tradition of historical recopilation. In which the archive becomes:

“a force for delegitimization of mythified and traditionalized memories’’

Fig 3. SADACCA front entrance(Source: Authors)