The BLDS Legacy team are delighted to announce that they have received funding from the University of Sussex Education and Innovation Fund for the project ‘Student Researchers in the BLDS Legacy Collection: Tricontinental, Mujeres, and the Worlds they Invite us to Imagine’.
In this project, we aim to engage students with the British Library for Development Studies Legacy Collection at the UoS Library, and co-produce a ‘learning toolkit’ for engaging with rare periodicals in the collection. Our focus will be on students preparing to carry out UG and PGT dissertation research. The BLDS Legacy Collection maps the landscape of global health and development policies, ideas and actions that emerged in a post-independence period at regional, national and transnational levels. It includes many items not held elsewhere, including in their countries of origin. We will work with students on the runs of two periodicals: Tricontinental, produced by the Organization for Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAL) from 1966-2019; and Mujeres, a publication of the Federation of Cuban Women launched in the early 1960s.
In doing so, we seek to Enhance students’ experience of the curriculum so that they can, in the words of the Learn to Transform strategy, ‘imagine every possible future’. Feminist scholars (Rentschler & Thrift 2015) emphasize the role archival materials play in providing materials through which future possibilities can be imagined. These two periodicals, oriented towards internationalist and feminist ‘worldmaking’ projects, are part of a collection unique to Sussex, and therefore offers a Distinctive and incomparable opportunity to engage in Student–Centred approaches to learning in which students participate as Research Practitioners. We will work with second-year and masters students from Global Studies in Spring 2024, introducing them to the Collection (and documentary research specifically), and supporting them to carry out research with the Tricontinental and Mujeres materials for their dissertations.
In the process, we will co-produce with these students a reusable and extensible ‘toolkit’ of pedagogical approaches, teaching ideas and discussion points reflecting the needs and experiences of these advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students when applying a decolonial lens to their work with the Collection. This will be accompanied by selections of the material that will be digitised, organised and hosted under the guidance of the Library’s Collection Development Team. The toolkit will be published online as part of the BLDS Legacy Collection website to encourage future use of the Collection, and as a teaching resource in its own right. It is anticipated that the digitised materials will be published via JSTOR Collections (alongside other Sussex Special Collections material)
If you’d like to get involved or find out more, just drop Danny (dgm24@sussex.ac.uk) or Paul (p.gilbert@sussex.ac.uk) a line.
The British Library for Development Studies Legacy Collection 