Community Archiving as imagining the world 'otherwise'? Spaces and practices of unofficial knowledge production in the UK

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This research will examine the socio-cultural role of community archives in the contemporary UK. Community or other non-official archives are important sources of alternative records that exist outside 'official' repositories. This is especially the case for members of BAME, LGBTQ+ and other under-represented groups in UK society, but is also true of working class histories and other forms of knowledge. These archives have become a subject of study for a variety of academic disciplines - it is increasingly recognised that archives are not neutral spaces, and their subjective and political constitution means that community archives in particular are often read as a form of activist praxis or as a way of creating insurgent or reparative histories which challenge established norms (Hall, 2001, Flinn, 2011, Prescod, 2017). However, as Caswell et al. (2017) argue whilst archives potentially provide spaces for marginalised groups to 'imagine otherwise' and counter mainstream narratives in which they are misrepresented or obscured, this is not a straightforward process.