As I come to the end of my time as a Student Curator, I find myself reflecting on how much this project has evolved. What began as an idea centred on migration and identity gradually became an exploration of the many ways people create a sense of home, preserve their heritage, and navigate life between cultures.
When I first began researching, I had assumed my collection would be largely made up of books. While literature remains at its heart, I quickly realised that stories of migration are expressed through far more than words alone. Photography, dance, film, food, podcasts, theatre, and visual art all became equally important parts of the collection. Together, they reveal that migration is not a single story or experience, but something deeply personal, creative, and multifaceted.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the project was discovering resources I might never otherwise have encountered. From Akram Khan’s choreography exploring identity and diaspora, to photographic projects documenting second-generation migrant experiences, to cookbooks preserving cultural heritage through family recipes, I found myself constantly expanding my understanding of what a library collection could include. These works reminded me that archives are not only built from official histories, but from memories, traditions, conversations, and everyday acts of cultural preservation.
Throughout the curation process, I also became increasingly aware of the responsibility involved in selecting resources. Migration is often discussed in political or statistical terms, yet behind every policy or headline are individuals, families, and communities with unique experiences. I wanted this collection to resist presenting a single narrative. Instead, I sought to include a diversity of voices and perspectives that reflect the complexity of migration itself- stories of joy and loss, resilience and uncertainty, departure and arrival, as well as the identities that emerge in the spaces between.
An image of the physical display- to see this in real life come to the first floor of Morell Library. Photo by Antonio Garcia Fernandez.
Working on this project has also reinforced the importance of representation within library collections. Libraries are places where people search not only for information but also for connection. Seeing your own experiences reflected in a book, a photograph, or a film can be incredibly meaningful, while encountering experiences different from your own can encourage empathy and understanding. I hope this collection contributes, in a small way, to creating a library space that reflects the diversity of the communities it serves.
An unexpected outcome of this project was recognising how many different ways migration can be understood. It is not only about crossing national borders. It can involve moving between languages, balancing multiple cultural identities, adapting to new communities, or carrying traditions across generations. Sometimes migration is visible; sometimes it is reflected in a family recipe, a piece of music, a work of art, or a memory shared between generations. Exploring these varied experiences has been one of the most enriching parts of the curation process.
Angelina El Chammas standing next to her curation. Photo by Paul Shields.
Although the collection is now complete, it does not feel finished. There are countless stories, perspectives, and creative works that could still be included. Rather than seeing this as a limitation, I see it as an invitation or beginning. I hope Between Worlds continues to grow through future recommendations, conversations, and discoveries, becoming a living resource that evolves alongside the communities it represents.
Finally, I would like to thank the Library team for their guidance, encouragement, and expertise throughout the project. From recommending resources and supporting acquisitions to helping bring both the digital guide and physical display to life, their enthusiasm made this experience incredibly rewarding. I am also grateful to everyone who shared recommendations, conversations, and reflections on the meaning of home. Every contribution helped shape the collection into something richer than I could have created alone.
Above all, I hope Between Worlds encourages visitors to approach migration with curiosity, empathy, and openness. Whether someone recognises their own experiences within these resources or encounters perspectives that are entirely new to them, I hope the collection sparks conversations about identity, belonging, and the many different ways people find- or create- a place to call home.
Ray Fairhurst, Student Curator Intern, standing in front of the physical display of their curated collection. Photo by Paul Shields.
For me, the process of creating a collection of books and other materials for the library was a very personal and enriching process. I chose the topic of estrangement as it has been something that has affected me, my mental health and my studies this year. Before experiencing it myself, I didn’t know much about it which is why I hope that my collection will be informative to people interested in learning more about it. While my estrangement wasn’t caused by my queer identity, I found out in my research that many LGBTQ+ people become estranged from their family members, whether by disownment or personal choices. Through the variety of material that I have selected, I hope that my collection will serve as a space for discussions and reflections of estrangement in which people can learn more about estranged LGBTQ+ people and their experiences. You can view the curation on this webpage.
One of the things that I noticed in my research and search for appropriate materials was that many non-fiction books and guides focus on reconciliation and position it as the ultimate goal of all estranged people. This was especially prevalent when I was looking for videos to include in my collection. I made an effort to exclude materials such as these for several reasons. First, I didn’t want to include mental health/self help guides in general; instead I have included the websites of multiple charities and organisations for if people want to look into those. Second, I believe that reconciliation is a very personal choice to make and I didn’t want to make assumptions about people’s situations or circumstances. I also feel that recommending reconciliation, especially to people who may be estranged for their own safety, is a dismissive and dangerous idea. With this in mind, I attempted to find materials which acknowledged that estrangement is a multifaceted experience which, though it can be isolating, is the right choice made by many people to keep them safe from family members. I do acknowledge, however, that several of the materials in my collection do end in reconciliation.
Ray Fairhurst’s collection display. Photo by Antonio Garcia Fernandez.
While looking for materials both within and outside of the university library, I noticed that there is limited content out there about estrangement for LGBTQ+ people. There is especially very little archival and historical information and material, though it is undoubtable that estrangement would have occurred to many LGBTQ+ people in the past and to this day. This is demonstrated through the charities which I found, such as Galop, which focus particularly on LGBTQ+ people and their experiences of domestic abuse. As a whole, the topic of estrangement as experienced by LGBTQ+ people is a newly researched, and as such an underresearched, topic. For my collection I elected to include some journal articles that have done research on estrangement in higher education because they discuss challenges faced by many estranged and independent students regardless of their identity.
Some of the material included in Ray’s curation. Photo by Ray Fairhurst.
Something that you might notice in my collection is the proliferation of Young Adult fiction primarily written in the past two decades. This is because LGBTQ+ fiction as a genre rapidly expanded in these years. Furthermore, many of the books are Young Adult because of the difficulty I had in finding adult fiction which focused on LGBTQ+ people and their relationships with their family members. Additionally, in my research I noticed several tropes which kept cropping up in books, many of which included the death of a family member or the estranged protagonist having to engage with their estranged family members in some way. I attempted to include as few of these tropes as possible, except where books have been empathetic towards the protagonist and the complexity of the situations at hand.
Selection of material included in Ray’s curation. Photo by Ray Fairhurst.
From the beginning of my curation back in June, I was interested in including graphic novels and other visual materials such as videos and zines. While it has been challenging to find materials such as those which focused on my topic, I found several graphic novels which were suitable for my curation. I also included online databases about LGBTQ+ culture, such as an online archive of historical LGBTQ+ badges used for activism and awareness, and several zines which are available for downloading if people are interested. I also found some videos about the topic which I hope have made my collection more accessible for people.
In my collection I have included a variety of memoirs and autobiographies by predominantly LGBTQ+ people, though a few authors are cishet. I managed to find a good amount of memoirs, possibly because estrangement is a topic which is well-suited to being written about from the perspective of those who have experienced it. I was happy to include them as I wanted to share LGBTQ+ experiences from the perspective of LGBTQ+ people. I think it is important to note that multiple of the memoirs are by celebrities, possibly because of the popularity of the celebrity memoir genre.
Selection of material included in Ray’s curation. Photo by Ray Fairhurst.
I wouldn’t have been able to curate my collection without the help of the university library staff. I would like to thank Antonio, David, Kirsty and Ilka for assisting me throughout the weekly meetings, especially with finding materials. Thank you to Kenny and the rest of the purchasing team who helped me in the acquiring of new materials. For the LibGuide and the reading list, I have Steph and Siobhan to thank for that, as I was using software I had never used before! I’d also like to thank Ned for posting all of the social media updates I made and helping me hype up my collection to the public. Thank you to everyone else in the library who helped me put my collection together and Paul for taking most of the photos in this post. This has been a wonderful summer and a wonderful experience and I’m so happy with all of the work that I have done with the library.
In the future, I am excited for my collection to move onto the new bookshelf in the library for years to come and for all the people who will interact and engage with it. I hope that my collection helps to raise awareness of estranged LGBTQ+ people and the challenges and difficulties we face and that more people will become aware of the intersectionality of being LGBTQ+ and estranged. I encourage you to explore and engage with the materials on offer in my collection and I hope you learn something new through them. Thank you for reading and for being part of my curation journey!
Student Curators Angelina El Chammas and Ray Fairhurst standing next to their collections. Photo by Paul Shields.
This is a guest post co-authored by the Library’s 2026/27 Graduate Engagement Leads for Open Research, Katie Vernon (Postgraduate Researcher, Centre for Medieval Studies) and Luqman Muraina (Postgraduate Researcher, Department of Politics and International Relations)
The UKSG Insights journal recently published our reflective piece, ‘Interdisciplinary collaboration for open research: reflections by Graduate Engagement Leads’, which offered personal thoughts on how this role has changed our outlooks and knowledge of open research. Key reflections focused on the challenges and opportunities we have experienced when promoting a culture for open research at York, and we hope this might provide a model for how PhD candidates working in library teams can promote open research communities of practice and help to ensure their longevity. In this blog post we summarise our activities over the past two years and provide more recent thoughts about the role and our experience of open research since writing the piece for Insights.
Being involved with and developing networks for open research has been a key focus of our role. We have helped to shape discussions about open research on social media such as the team’s Bluesky account, within the Open Research Advocates Network, and more widely at conferences. Luqman was able to present a lightning talk at the UKSG 2025 conference on ‘Enhancing Open Research Culture at the University of York: Lessons Learned from our Community of Practice’, and a breakout session at UKSG 2026 on ‘Africa in the Open: Reimagining Global Knowledge Beyond Western Publication Models’. Katie also presented our collaboratively-made poster, ‘Five Years of Open Research Awards at the University of York’ at Manchester’s Open Research Conference 2025, and was recently able to attend a MORPHSS (Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences) workshop in Sheffield aimed at creating a resource for training and showcasing what ‘openness’ could mean for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences research. These experiences have reshaped our understanding of open research practices and enabled us to think more reflectively from different perspectives of various communities throughout Higher Education.
Katie at the Manchester Open Research conference
We have also been able to organise and be part of activities for researchers at the University. Particular highlights have included online lunchtime events, most recently Reproducibility in Quantitative Social Sciences Research, for which we were joined in discussion by colleagues from the University of Oxford and various departments and professional services across York. We have also delivered bespoke training to interdisciplinary research centres including Medieval Studies and Modern Studies. Steadily building connections across the University is paying off, with many of this year’s one-off events and training sessions requested to be delivered again.
A particularly enjoyable opportunity was acting as panellists for York’s Open Research Awards. We were able to see the many different projects being undertaken throughout the University, from taught students to postgraduate researchers, early-career researchers and senior level staff. We had a relatively high number of submissions for this year’s Awards, and hope this shows we are doing something right in reaching out to communities across the University. The variety and quality of submissions have been staggering, and we have been able to see how researchers are at the forefront of finding new ways of doing open research, from different types of publication, to community outreach or online media and creative outputs. It has been such a privilege to see the great research that York’s community is undertaking and then share these projects through the ongoing Open Research in Practice case studies series.
Luqman at the UKSG26 conference (credit: Peter Lawson / source)
A personal impact has been how we will approach open research ourselves. We have noticed an increased personal drive to practice open research, given that we have seen the benefits it brings to communities. The role has motivated us to think carefully about where we publish and share our work and prompted us to advocate for open research in our own areas of interest. We hope to see an increasing drive for equitable academic publishing, having advocated at conferences and directly with researchers at York to consider publishing with diamond and non-profit presses. Further thoughts on our practices were shared in our case studies, such as Katie’s reflections on writing an open book chapter and in our contributions to the Open Research Journeys at York Q&A series.
Katie has recently taken up a volunteer associate editor role at DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals), assisting with reviewing applications by journals to be listed. Luqman has also begun a new Research Associate role in the CAREERS (Citizen Science for Advancing Racial Equity in Environmental Research Super-consortium) project which involves environmental Citizen Science activities, multiple stakeholder and collaborative engagements, and participatory approaches. This project reflects a wider trend we have noticed across the University where funded projects incorporate open research-aligned practices but may not be directly defined or codified as such.
As we approach the end of another year in this role, we acknowledge that there is still more work to be done. Feedback from events has shown how useful our training is, but also how barriers are still in place for researchers, especially around knowledge gaps and the perceived ‘additional work’ doing open research poses. Looking to the future, we hope that a cultural change, led by established academics, supported by appropriate funding and incentivised by universities will enable everyone to publish and share their research openly.
Hi! I’m Angelina, a History student at the University of York and one of this year’s Student Curators.
Some of my academic interests centre around identity, cultural exchange, and the ways people understand themselves within wider historical and social contexts. Through modules exploring topics such as the Islamic world, empire, and cultural interaction, I have become increasingly interested in how identities are formed, challenged, and reshaped over time.
Alongside my academic interests, this theme is also personal to me. I have Lebanese and English heritage, and throughout my life I have moved between different places, communities, and social environments. As a result, I have found myself reflecting on questions of home, belonging, and identity.
More recently, these questions have felt especially significant as conflict near my father’s hometown has affected members of my family and prompted conversations about displacement, memory, and what it means to belong to a place. I wanted to honour the sacrifice he made in moving so far away from his family so that we might have better opportunities and more safety, and I have decided to do so by highlighting parts of his experience in moving to the UK.
A photograph of my dad, preparing our family some Warra Aroueesh, a Lebanese recipe passed down through the family, which is all of our favourite food.
Introducing “Between Worlds”
For my curation project, I will be exploring the theme “Between Worlds: Identity, Belonging, and the In-Between.”
This collection examines the experiences of people who exist between cultures, identities, communities. It explores what it means to navigate multiple identities at once, through migration, mixed heritage, diaspora, language, family history, or personal experience.
While discussions of identity often focus on categories and labels, I am interested in the spaces between them. What happens when you don’t feel fully represented by a single identity? How do people create a sense of home when they belong to multiple places at once? How do individuals navigate social worlds that sometimes seem to pull them in different directions?
These questions are increasingly relevant in a diverse and international university community, where many students are negotiating different aspects of their identity every day.
Couple dancing together in their home filled with moving boxes
Why This Theme Matters
Belonging is something many of us think about, whether consciously or unconsciously.
For some people, it might involve balancing different cultural backgrounds. For others, it may relate to moving between countries, languages, faiths, or communities. I hope this curation creates space for those conversations. Rather than focusing solely on struggle, I want to highlight the creativity, resilience, and self-definition that often emerge from living between worlds.
Questions of identity and belonging feel particularly significant at the moment. Across the UK, conversations around immigration, national identity, and who belongs within society have become increasingly visible and often deeply polarised. Public debate can sometimes reduce migration to statistics, policies, or political slogans, leaving little room for the lived experiences of the individuals and families whose lives are shaped by these issues. These are not abstract issues but realities that continue to affect communities both within the UK and across the world.
One of my motivations for choosing this theme is a desire to highlight the human experiences that can sometimes be lost within wider political debates. I aim to explore the complexities of belonging, while creating space for voices that are not always heard. Rather than presenting a single narrative, I want this collection to reflect the diversity of experiences that exist within immigrant and diasporic communities, as well as the many different ways people understand home.
By bringing together various perspectives across this curation, I hope the collection encourages reflection, empathy, and a stronger sense of connection across our university community.
A father sat reading with his daughter
What to Expect
Over the coming weeks, I will be researching and curating a collection of books, articles, memoirs, poetry, and other resources that explore themes of identity and belonging from a range of perspectives.
The collection may include:
Fiction exploring migration, diaspora, and mixed identity
Memoirs and personal narratives
Academic works on identity, culture, and belonging
Voices from underrepresented communities
One question has stayed with me throughout the development of this project: What does home mean to you?
As the collection develops, I hope to gather responses from students and members of the wider community. I have createdthe google form below where, if you choose, you can submit your ideas of home, which can be highlighted in the collection. Whether home is a place, a language, a person, a memory, or something more complicated, I would love to hear different perspectives:
Hi! I’m Ray, I’m a second year Curating and Art History student and I’m one of the student curators this year. I am part of the LGBTQ+ community, I use he/they pronouns, and I am estranged from most members of my family. I am excited to make a collection which highlights the intersectionality of being both queer and estranged.
I feel that it is important to note that for me, these are two separate things. While me and my queerness have not been supported very well by my family, this is not the primary reason for my being estranged. For many people, their estrangement is connected to or because of their queerness.
What is estrangement?
Estrangement is when people have limited or no contact with their biological or adoptive family. This can be caused by disownment, distancing, or be the choice of the individual. Estrangement can occur because of many reasons but in the case of LGBTQ+ people, it is often because their families are unsupportive of their identities.
Contextualising queer people and estrangement
There are various studies and statistics online which claim that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be estranged than non-LGBTQ+ people. For instance, a study done by the LGBTQ+ charity Just Like Us found that around 46% of LGBTQ+ young adults are estranged from their family, while an even higher number of LGBTQ+ people do not feel close to their immediate family. (See Just Like Us, Positive Futures, January 2023, page 9. https://www.justlikeus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Positive-Futures-report-by-Just-Like-Us-compressed-for-mobile.pdf.).
Some prominent celebrities who are estranged from at least one family member include Elliot Page and Vivian Wilson (née Musk). I hope that sharing this information will help people reading this see that they are not alone and feel validated.
Why is this topic important?
A study done in 2015 by Stand Alone and Unite states that family rejection of LGBTQ+ people was found to be one of the more common causes for students being estranged. (See Stand Alone and Unite, New Starts, 2015, page 5. https://www.standalone.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2013/08/StandAloneUNITEfoundation.pdf).
Keeping in mind the intersectionality between being queer and being estranged, I want to promote positive stories and attitudes towards estrangement, helping to show that people aren’t alone and that family can be found in other places.
I’ve called my collection “Curating Connections” because I want to explore how LGBTQ+ people create our families. I considered other terms but didn’t want to choose a term which suggests a more negative perspective of estrangement. Instead, I want to prioritise the idea of LGBTQ+ people choosing (curating) our connections, whether that’s by disconnecting from some people, or connecting with others.
I want this collection to make people who are LGBTQ+ and estranged feel less alone, while also informing people who are part of one or neither of these communities about the experiences of people within these two communities.
I want this collection to showcase that estrangement can be a positive thing. While lots of media suggests that estrangement is negative, estrangement is an important tool that can be used to protect people and set boundaries with family members. I want to show that estrangement, while often a very difficult experience, can make people safer and free to be who they are.
I also know that being estranged is a very difficult and complex situation, which is why I want to share a range of stories, experiences and perspectives in the hopes that people looking at my collection can learn something new or engage with different attitudes. I don’t want to alienate anyone or their experiences, I want to create a space where people can learn new things and explore other perspectives.
I know that LGBTQ+ people aren’t a monolith, and neither are their experiences of being estranged. This is why I’d like to offer a diverse range of media and perspectives. With this knowledge and this platform, I want to inform people and show other estranged LGBTQ+ people that they aren’t alone.
I want to use this space and platform to promote materials exploring LGBTQ+ people and family relationships, whether biological or found. I hope to showcase fiction books, especially ones exploring family relationships or featuring found family, and memoirs by people who are estranged.
I also want to share some charities which people might find helpful, especially ones with information and studies of the intersectionality of being LGBTQ+ and estranged. I also want a range of visual styles, featuring zines, graphic novels, fiction, non fiction, poetry, and more. I’d also like to feature some scientific journal articles about LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of being estranged.
I am very excited for this project and hope to include materials which people will find helpful and interesting to read. I look forward to the completion of this project and am excited to see what the future brings!
What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. While not about being LGBTQ, I found this to be a really beautiful book exploring childhood trauma and building your own family. I would recommend reading it while waiting for the completion of the collection. This book does have explicit portrayals of child abuse, physical abuse and mental illness/suicidal thoughts, with minor depictions of drug use, racism and misogyny.
This book is part of the University of York library collection.
This year’s International Open Access Week theme asks ‘Who owns our knowledge?’, challenging us to reflect on not only who has access to the research we produce, but on how knowledge is created and shared. Significant progress has been made in some areas towards putting ‘Community over Commercialization’, the theme of OA Week in 2023 and 2024), but new concerns and risks have emerged:
The rush to scrape academic knowledge to train artificial intelligence models and to integrate AI into academic processes—often without proper consultation or author consent—threatens to undermine our knowledge systems. Surveillance that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through some publisher platforms. Nevertheless, the community-owned, community-led, and non-commercial approaches to knowledge sharing called for by the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and Toluca-Cape Town Declaration offer pathways away from these risks toward a future where individuals and communities own and benefit from their own knowledge.
The University of York Library has a longstanding commitment to Supporting the wider open research ecosystem, in line with many other UK universities and pledges made in the recent N8 Statement on Sustainable Scholarly Publishing (see our previous post, Pathways to sustainable scholarly publishing). Despite a backdrop of financial challenges across the sector, we have continued to support a range of initiatives, tools and infrastructure services that help facilitate open research practice. Most of the organisations we support can be described as community-led, and one of our key principles for support is that initiatives should operate on a not-for-profit basis or should be affiliated with a research or educational institution.
Approaches for supporting external initiatives are varied, ranging from small one-off donations to multiple-year subscriptions and formal memberships. We engage with collective and consortia-based approaches such as the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), now in its sixth funding cycle, and Jisc Open Access Community Framework (OACF), which is currently under review with the intention of opening up for a new round of applications in 2026. Recommendations and decisions are made by the Content and Open Research team, in consultation with the Collections Community group and in response to suggestions from our academic colleagues including members of the Open Research Advocates network.
Here, we highlight a selection of initiatives we have supported over the years:
Open Book Collective (OBC)
OBC is a charity bringing together publishers and libraries to secure the diversity and financial futures of open access book production and dissemination. They are a registered UK charity, with a governance structure that is community-led at its core. As a supporting member institution, the University Library collectively participates in decision-making relative to the OBC’s management, membership policies, and long-term strategic planning.
Through OBC we have the opportunity to directly support independent publishers across a range of disciplines, which include African Minds, Mattering Press, mediastudies.press, Meson Press and White Horse Press. We also support and utilise the open source metadata management and dissemination platform Thoth, which helps publishers get open access works into the book supply chain to ensure their long-term sustainability and accessibility. OBC also manages a Collective Development Fund, a grant giving programme for emergent open access book initiatives, which recently completed its second round.
PCI is a researcher-led organisation which provides an evaluation and recommendation service for scientific preprints. Authors can deposit their preprint along with data, script and code, in any open repository, then submit the article to a thematic PCI (community of researchers) where it undergoes rigorous open peer review by researchers in the field. Following evaluation, the paper may receive recommendation from the PCI, a form of validation which makes them complete, reliable and citable articles.
Authors can choose to publish their paper formally (without charge) in the Peer Community Journal, or submit it to a PCI-friendly journal which has committed to accepting PCI-recommended articles without need for further peer review. Another recent development is PCI Registered Reports, a community dedicated to reviewing and evaluating study proposals, thereby addressing certain publication and reporting biases that may be embedded in ‘traditional’ journals.
Back in May, Professor Christopher Chambers, PCI Publication Director, introduced PCI Registered Reports and contributed to a discussion on Registered Reports and the future of peer review with researchers from Psychology and Education.
OAPEN
The OAPEN Foundation is an open access advocacy organisation based in the Netherlands, which counts the University Library amongst its supporting members. They work to promote and support the global transition to open access for academic books through infrastructure services for publishers, libraries and funders. Their services includes the OAPEN Library, which recently marked its 15th anniversary and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a searchable discovery tool which indexes almost 100,000 open access titles including our own White Rose University Press publications. DOAB results are also integrated into YorSearch and Reading Lists.
Another key resource is the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit, which aims to help book authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books. It provides quick and brief introductions to specific topics, mapped to an eight-stage research lifecycle. The Library has integrated and signposted some of this guidance in our own Open Access Publishing Practical Guide.
Programming Historian
Programming Historian delivers openly-licensed peer reviewed tutorials which help arts and humanities researchers discover new digital tools, techniques and workflows. They encourage practitioners to use their lessons for learning new technical skills and teach about new methods in classes or workshops. The lesson index is organised by stages of the research process and includes over one hundred tutorials on topics including coding, data analysis and visualisation, which we refer to in our Digital Skills guides.
The project is international, volunteer-driven and not-for-profit, supported by individual donations and a broad institutional membership including the University Library. Their publishing model adheres to the ‘diamond’ form of open access with no charges placed on authors or readers of their tutorials, and they are recognised by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – another key piece of open access infrastructure we support!
If you are interested in contributing to Programming Historian you can write a lesson, join their team of reviewers or provide feedback. We are also interested to hear from anyone at the University who has used this resource in their learning, teaching or research as example cases: lib-open-research@york.ac.uk
Dan Denis is a Lecturer in Psychology, having joined the University of York in 2022 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow. His primary research interest is understanding how we identify and prioritise key information in our environment so that we can remember important events. Dan is a member of the York Open Research Advocates network and the lead for the Open Science Interest Group which meets regularly to discuss practices in the Department of Psychology.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research really started upon learning about the replication crisis in Psychology, the finding that many influential studies could not be replicated. I started to think specifically about how these issues may arise in my own area of research, that focuses on the relationship between sleep and cognition. I realised that many of the challenges in this field (which include challenging data collection, small sample size, and issues of multiple comparisons and selective reporting of statistics) could be improved by engaging in open science practices.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
One of the first challenges was how to organise my data for sharing. We record the brain activity of sleeping participants using a technique called electroencephalography which creates large and complex datasets. Previously I had given very little thought to how I organised my data, but when it came to uploading these data to a repository I found that it required the data to be stored according to a very specific standard (the Brain Imaging Data Structure, BIDS). Converting the data to the required specification was difficult and at times overwhelming. I learned a lot about the logic of designing file directories, and making your data as easy to understand as possible for both a human and a machine.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging in open research practices has given me a lot of skills that have supplemented my skills as a researcher. Learning about how to format data according to BIDS has given me a standard template for how to organise my data. While it was a very time intensive process the first time, the skills I learned meant that converting a second dataset to the BIDS standard was much faster. Now that I am knowledgeable about the standard data sharing template in my field, in my most recent experiments I have set things up so everything is saved according to the BIDS specification from the outset. I now have the data for almost all of my studies stored in the same format, which means that I have a much better understanding of my own data, and this has facilitated the sharing of data with the wider community much smoother.
Kirralise Hansford is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nuffield Department of Women’s & Reproductive Health within the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford and a 2025 Ambassador for Open Science at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. Kirralise completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging at York in 2024 and worked with the Library as an Open Research Graduate Engagement Lead for the Sciences. Her Open Research Journey reflects her perspectives at the beginning of this role.
What started your interest in open research?
When I was completing my MSc, I attended a lecture on open research practices and was confused about why this wasn’t just how research was done anyway. It made me sceptical about research that was not pre-registered, did not have open data, and that did not give adequate details for replication. I knew I wanted to work in research to expand our knowledge of sensory neuroscience and its applications to clinical populations, but I was only prepared to do this if I knew that my research practices would be open, replicable, and reproducible.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices
When starting my PhD, I wanted to do every study as a registered report, as I was sure this was the best way to do research. However, my supervisors were cautious of this approach given the lengthy process involved and the time constraints of a PhD. We agreed to do one of my studies in a registered report format, which was the first time any of us had done so. As they predicted, doing a registered report did take a long time. It even took a lot longer than they had expected, meaning that data collection was delayed until the final year of my PhD, which was not ideal! This process showed me that engaging in open research practices is not always easy, and if your research is quite exploratory and interdisciplinary, it can create additional barriers (in my case, a lengthy review process).
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Given the lengthy process of doing a registered report, I was able to fill my time with 2 additional projects that were not planned to be included within my PhD, and both projects gave me the opportunity to engage in new open research practices. For one project, I learnt how to make my research fully computationally reproducible. This process was tricky at times, but taught me some great coding and collaboration skills which are transferable to any new projects I undertake. The other project had a clinical focus, which allowed me to develop open research skills in public research dissemination.
The skills I have learnt through engaging with open research practices during my PhD have made me a better researcher. I now have a deeper understanding of how important it is to plan your research study before collecting data, how useful it is to have accessible and reproducible data and analyses scripts, and how vital it is to share the research outputs within the wider community.
Zlatomira (Zlati) Ilchovska is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology where her research interests include bi-/multilingualism and its role as a possible cognitive/brain protective life-long experience. She is passionate about open scholarship and doing and teaching better science, and received a York Open Research Award in 2025 as a member of the Feminist Wonderlab Collective. Zlati wrote about the foundation of this international ECR-led feminist research group in an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
During my undergraduate education in Psychology, I remember struggling to access published literature and experimental materials, as my university in Bulgaria did not have any journal subscription at the time. Much later, during my first months of the PhD at the University of Birmingham, I learned about the drive in science to preregister, preprint and share materials openly, and this completely changed my idea of research and academic work, providing me an opportunity to contribute to what I missed the most in my education.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
It is a steep learning curve in the beginning, and it takes time to get “converted” if one has never done any open science activities before, but once this happens, it becomes a fruitful learning process.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Open scholarship helped me understand the gaps in my and others’ research, and made me a much stronger researcher in terms of planning methodology, analysing data and understanding the outcomes.
Alfie Lien-Talks is an AHRC-funded postgraduate researcher in digital archaeology, working in collaborative partnership with the Archaeology Data Service and Historic England. His research focuses on the reusability of archaeological datasets and explores how AI, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to improve data accessibility, integration, and interpretation in heritage research.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research and open data was sparked upon the realisation that, in the field of bioarchaeology, there is a limited amount of material available for scholarly inquiry. Acknowledging the finite nature of these resources, it becomes imperative for researchers to ensure maximal accessibility to existing data in order to fully leverage its academic impact. As archaeology is fundamentally concerned with elucidating the human past, broad data availability takes on an ethical dimension as well. Enabling comprehensive access to our ancestors’ stories has thus become a guiding principle propelling my commitment to open research practices and unfettered data sharing in my field.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
Pursuing open research has presented complex challenges in navigating issues surrounding data privacy and ethical considerations. Achieving the appropriate balance between transparency and sensitive information protection has proven an intricate undertaking. However, grappling with these issues has ultimately reaffirmed the paramount importance of responsible and ethical approaches to data availability in scholarly work.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Adopting open research practices, particularly FAIR data sharing principles, has led to tangible scholarly benefits. Open availability of my work has allowed for wider dissemination and collaboration within both my core discipline and related fields. Embracing open data has also opened unanticipated interdisciplinary avenues, substantially enriching the reach and impact of my research. Overall, connectivity with the broader academic community has proven the most valuable aspect of open scholarship.
Andrew Mason is a Lecturer in the York Against Cancer funded Jack Birch Unit of Molecular Carcinogenesis, Department of Biology. His research has two main areas: characterising human urothelial carcinoma, and understanding the impacts of endogenous retrovirus interactions in avian and human cancers. Andrew is a longstanding member of the York Open Research Advocates network and also a Data Stewardship training fellow in the UK node of the pan-European Elixir organisation.
What started your interest in open research?
During my PhD I was trying to find and analyse as many diverse chicken whole genome sequencing datasets as possible. I quickly learned what informative metadata was (and wasn’t!) and that I would often need to discard technically high quality data if I wasn’t able to reliably annotate it. This was frustrating, so I made sure to make my shared data as clear and informative as possible.
These open research skills developed through my membership of chicken genome consortia (reference genome, pangenome and diversity) and as bioinformatic lead in the bladder cancer research and clinical partnership in the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project. I wanted to find ways to embed these open research practices in Biology (rather than my experience of fumbling along), so I developed my skills further in an Elixir-UK Data Stewardship and Training Fellowship.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
The sensitive nature of data has always been a stumbling block for fully open data practices in my research. Initially this was because I was working on commercially-sensitive data from industry, but increasingly my work uses highly sensitive and (technically) identifiable human data. This is not just because we have clinical metadata for patients. Having full genome DNA sequence data is genuinely unique, and governments, health care and industry (pharma, insurance etc.) are still in a phase of understanding how that data should be managed, stored and utilised. This often means data is open but behind some kind of wall (i.e. a data access committee; DAC), or only accessible through a trusted research environment (TRE). This is still open practice, but many of us have experienced a DAC who limits access, or won’t even answer emails.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Fundamentally, following open research practices has improved my own record keeping, data management and dissemination of data. I always work imagining what someone else would make of my file structure or code! An unexpected benefit has been the positive impact on my teaching practice, as I have been able to augment Biology’s already fantastic materials for teaching data science to undergraduates and postgraduates, by incorporating research data management resources from my Elixir fellowship.
I’ve also found the wider open research and research data management community really welcoming and engaging – both at York and wider (UK and Europe) through Elixir.
Colleen Morgan is the Senior Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology, and Director of the Digital Archaeology and Heritage Lab. She has an established international reputation as a leading scholar in critical digital archaeology and heritage. Colleen is a longstanding Open Research Advocate with an interest in supporting archaeology staff and students in considering open access publishing, open research, and general transparency in practice.
What started your interest in open research?
I began research blogging in 2002, chronicling my first archaeological field school as an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Since that time I’ve continued to participate in most kinds of creative social media, such as Flickr, Instagram, YouTube and now TikTok. I’ve written quite a bit about science communication and was steeped in the Open Source/Open Access and Creative Commons movements through my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. With help, I founded “Then Dig” which was an Open Access, Open Peer Review archaeology journal, which ran for a few years until everyone became too busy to maintain it any longer. Since that time I’ve always ensured that my research is as open as possible–it is an even deeper ethos for archaeologists, as we destroy much of the contextual evidence around our data as we excavate, so it is imperative that we share this data.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
There are many countries where it is forbidden to openly share excavation data online or anywhere else before approvals from the government agencies. As a guest in these places, it is important to abide by these rules, or else you can lose your permit to excavate. This is true to a certain extent even in the UK, as sharing excavation locations can result in what are sometimes called “Nighthawks” that come and dig around in the site looking for treasure, or worse, human remains to collect and sell.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
I think engagement at the very beginning of social media raised my research profile beyond what it might have been without this sharing. I am happy that a community of researchers and science communicators were able to creatively experiment with ways to share their passion and enthusiasm for the past. There are better standards now for open data and the FAIR principles and in particular reuse has become much more prevalent, informing research such as the Avebury Papers, which was the digitisation, exploration and reuse of the archival materials associated with the Neolithic henge site of Avebury in Wiltshire. It is also a fundamental element of the Tetrarchs project, which aimed to reuse archaeological data to tell stories. Such projects are only the beginning; hopefully there will be a lot more work in this area in the near future.
Luqman Muraina is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, based in the Department of Politics and International Relations. His research focuses on the topic of decolonising development studies and teaching informed by alternative development epistemologies in Nigerian Universities. Since 2023 he has been an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Social Sciences, working with the Library and practitioners in his Faculty to develop training, advocacy and community-building initiatives.
What started your interest in open research?
There was an advertisement for an open research seminar during my Master’s program at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. I found Open Research enticing, concerning how it presents an opportunity for a new research order, bringing the university closer to the community and ensuring that the outcomes of higher education public funding is immediately available for public consumption.
I was so inspired about the variety of open practices I could engage in my research, especially open data. Subsequently, I attended additional seminars on open licences, data management planning, etc. I immediately practised open data by depositing my qualitative data into the UCT’s repository (Zivahub), which was a rigorous yet pleasing process. I was encouraged by how others could use, cite, and adapt my data.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
Open research can sometimes become an extra task for a usually overwhelmed and busy researcher. In my experience of practising open data, I ensure to obtain consent from participants concerning making the data open, which can be sometimes difficult to get – requires further explanation. Similarly, the repository back-end personnel (at UCT) returned my qualitative data transcripts twice as not passing the anonymity practice, i.e., some details included in the data can be attributed to a specific person/group in which the research is attributed to. This proved time-consuming to fix.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Open research aids scientific transparency and conformity to ethical guidelines. Transparency offers the opportunity to reduce the pressure to perform illegitimate and unethical scientific practice, i.e., data falsification, plagiarism, contracting, etc. If a research work is more accessible and data is openly available, there’s more consciousness on the part of the researcher to be transparent and ensure a just and fair research report and good practices. For example with open data, I took extra efforts in cleaning the data to ensure that the qualitative data do not include anything that makes inference to specific persons (including my participants), communities or groups.
Career wise, open research is also a means to get recognised for one’s hard work. For example, by publishing my data on a repository. means I can be cited both in traditional journal publications and also get my data cited independently.
Yorgos Paschos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, having recently completed a PhD in the Department of Archaeology researching the (sub)cultural heritage significance of grassroots music venues. During his time as a PGR he was an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Arts and Humanities. Yorgos has also shared his reflections on preparing to publish his PhD thesis open access as an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research began during my PhD work in Grassroots Music Venues and cultural heritage, where accessibility and inclusivity are critical. I quickly realised that open research not only democratises knowledge but also allows for broader collaboration, especially with non-academic communities. A turning point that boosted my interest in open research was my involvement in the Archive: All Areas exhibition, where I saw firsthand how open access to research could empower communities to engage with their local music heritage. This experience underscored the transformative potential of open research to connect academia with real-world impact.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
One challenge has been navigating the technical aspects of open research, such as understanding the different licensing options or identifying the best platforms for open-access publishing. Additionally, I’ve found that raising awareness about open research often requires clear communication to address questions or uncertainties. These experiences have taught me the importance of providing accessible resources and creating supportive environments to help others adopt open practices more confidently.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging with open research has had several positives for me, both professionally and personally. It has broadened the reach of my work, allowing me to connect with audiences outside academia, including policymakers and community groups. Open research has also fostered collaborations I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, as it breaks down barriers between disciplines and institutions.
Joe Spearing is a Research Fellow with the Health and Social Care Policy group in Centre for Health Economics. His research interests include disability benefits, mental health and working conditions, the health and social care workforce and demand and supply of social care. Joe is also an Open Research Advocate and ECR Representative member of the Open Research Strategy Group, which provides guidance and direction for open research activities at the University of York.
What started your interest in open research?
For me, open research is about equity and rigor. I became interested in open research because significant advances have been made in Economics by the use of replication packages and sharing of code, where researchers have been able to identify and correct coding errors. We have a lot further to go in building the infrastructure which would allow us to confidently share code and promote norms around publishing replication packages, but doing so potentially improves the reliability of our quantitative results. I’m interested in finding ways to further this.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
I see two major challenges around open research for quantitative social scientists: the first is our norms of sharing and giving feedback on code before publication. Before I submit an article to a journal it has typically been read by multiple people who have given feedback on it, but as a discipline we check each other’s code much less often, and even then it is mostly for “accuracy” rather than readability. Shifting norms is difficult, but there are a lot of people, including at York, working to try to do this.
Secondly, using replication files is often understood as something of an adversarial activity: early career researchers are often frightened of sharing their code widely for fear of exposing an embarrassing mistake. This relates partly to the reality that a lot of time the code has not been checked extensively by others, and also to academia’s often competitive culture.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
For me, open research has been an invitation to take my own empirical research more seriously: to think about my analysis code as a tool for wider consumption rather than just for delivering results; and to begin to build my capacity to write code which is more easily understandable for a wider audience. I think it has improved my workflow and my confidence in my results. I hope to engage further with efforts to build a greater culture of sharing and giving feedback on work before publication, which I hope will build my confidence in my work.
Katie Vernon is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Centre for Medieval Studies, whose research focuses on arms and armour in Middle English romance. She is an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Arts and Humanities, sharing her passion for access to higher education and working with both academic and external organisations to make research available to the wider public. Katie has also shared her experiences of publishing an open access book chapter as an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research began through my love of heritage and longstanding involvement in educational outreach. I wanted to share research that I found exciting and through my time volunteering in digital heritage I realised just how much information is out there waiting to be put online and read. I have recently been thrilled to see how far reaching the impact of open research is with engaging different communities across academia, heritage and the public; for instance, publishing a review of an exhibition at the Royal Armouries in ‘Aspectus’ has led to an invitation to lead a public workshop.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
There have been a few challenges for engaging in open research practices. Firstly, producing written work to share research with different audiences has been challenging; this includes changing reading level when working with heritage groups but also changing subject-specific jargon when working with scholars in different fields. Which brings me onto my second challenge, of finding pockets of scholars who are engaged in publishing open research in my field. I have found that the best way to navigate this issue has been to take an increasingly interdisciplinary view, collaborating with scholars in fields very different from my own.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging with open research has really opened my eyes to the different ways in which research can be shared, and I have been pleasantly surprised to see how open research principles are increasingly gaining traction. It has enabled me to join new communities of researchers from across different institutions and disciplines. It has also allowed me to think about my research in a new light, and I have been able to develop ideas further through thinking about how I might frame them to different audiences and what impact my work can have on different groups.
Credits
Open Research Journeys were originally published in the internal Open Research Newsletter between December 2023 and June 2025. We would like to thank each of the contributors for sharing their insights and our Graduate Engagement Leads, Kirralise Hansford, Melissa Kays, Luqman Muraina, Yorgos Paschos and Katie Vernon, for initiating and helping to deliver this project.
This resource is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike International 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The statement, developed collaboratively by senior leaders across the N8 universities including Library Directors, Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Research, and Vice-Chancellors, sets out five key commitments:
Exploring shared infrastructure and supporting enhanced green open access proactively through institutional repositories
Investing in non-profit tools and platforms that support open research and transparent publishing
Engaging researchers in conversations about the impact of their publishing choices
Sharing best practices with the wider library and research sector
Championing a positive research culture through open access, responsible metrics, and inclusive infrastructure
Alongside the publication of the statement in June, Professor Charlie Jeffery, University of York Vice-Chancellor and President and previous Chair of the N8 Research Partnership, commented:
For too long, we’ve seen the consolidation of scholarly publishing into the hands of a few major commercial players whose priorities are increasingly divorced from the academic communities they were meant to serve.
Our researchers are delivering work that will help improve the world around us. They then review and edit this work – often without compensation – and yet institutions are charged both to publish and to access this knowledge. The balance has tipped too far, and we hope this statement represents a first step towards the N8 working with publishers to develop a different approach that will benefit all parties.
Professor Charlie Jeffrey discusses how the N8 is exploring new infrastructures to speed up access to knowledge
Launch event
York Law School and Department of Sociology
On 12 June 2025 we welcomed colleagues from across and beyond the N8 to the York Law School and Department of Sociology for Pathways to sustainable scholarly publishing. The event was opened by Professor Sarah Thompson, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, who declared that the launch of the new statement represented a moment to be proud of the N8 and an opportunity to celebrate the collaborations that enable the collective’s libraries to be pro-active and forward thinking.
Sarah outlined that an active conversation with publishers is particularly critical at this moment in time due to the acute financial challenges universities are facing. She described the statement as an extremely welcome intervention from the N8, affirming as it does its members’ commitment to collaborating and influencing the future of sustainable scholarly publishing.
Further context to the launch of the statement was then provided by Kirsty Lingstadt, Director of Library, Learning, Archives and Wellbeing:
Following the N8’s Rights Retention activity in 2023, we looked at what we could do next. Scholarly publishing was in a difficult place, and there were certain challenges thrown into sharp relief by the financial situation facing the sector. Scholarly publishing is a core part of the research, infrastructure and eco-system that we find ourselves in but we’re increasingly having to make difficult choices due to rising costs. As such, making open access available to all has become harder and harder as we’ve moved along.
Professor Christopher Pressler, John Rylands University Librarian at the University of Manchester and chair of the N8 Library Directors’ Group, delivered a succinct summary of what the N8’s statement hopes to achieve before the event’s first panel discussion, chaired by Anna Clements, Director of Library Services and University Librarian at the University of Sheffield. Participants were Anna Vernon, Head of Research Licensing at Jisc and Sara Ball, Strategy Lead for Open Science, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), who shared insights on the national approaches being taken to drive efficiency and deliver value for money in scholarly publishing.
L-R: Sara Ball, Anna Vernon, Professor Christopher Pressler
The second panel session was chaired by Sarah Thompson, Associate Director of Libraries, Archives and Learning Services. This session featured presentations from three scholarly publishers who have already made strategic commitments to supporting open science and introducing sustainable open access business models, reflecting the missions of their parent organisations and societies. The panel were Dr Caroline Edwards, Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities, and Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London, Clare Curtis, Director of Content and Engagement at the Biochemical Society/Portland Press, and Chris Bennett, Global Commercial Director at Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
Dr Caroline Edwards reflected on the work of the Open Library of Humanities and recently-announced Open Journals Collective:
We’re not reinventing the wheel – we are just consolidating what already exists. We are asking for libraries to consider our journals as part of their collections budgets, rather than as marginal within library budgets. More than this, we are asking librarians to help us craft the future of scholarly journals publishing. We’re going to build a better alternative to transformative agreements because, as discussed today, they are fundamentally inequitable.
L-R: Clare Curtis, Chris Bennett, Dr Caroline Edwards, Sarah Thompson
The event wrapped up with a final panel session on research communication and civic engagement, chaired by Andrew Barker, Director of Library Services & Learning Development at Lancaster University. Before beginning the session, Andrew paid a warm tribute to his colleague and friend Elaine Sykes, Head of Open Research at Lancaster University, whose sudden and unexpected death was confirmed earlier that week.
The subsequent discussion centered around the efforts and challenges of creating a more inclusive, accessible, and representative research culture within academia. It featured contributions by Dr Emma Yhnell, Reader and Associate Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, College of Biomedical and Life Sciences at Cardiff University, and two researchers from York, Dr Clau Nader, Research Associate in the Department of Health Sciences, and Dr Kate Lancaster, Lecturer in the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology.
The panel discussed the systemic barriers in academia, especially the pressure to conform to outdated metrics such as publishing in high-impact journals. In a fitting end to the day, our final panelists agreed that change often starts with a few brave voices, encouraging collective momentum toward a more just and inclusive research and publishing environment.
L-R: Dr Kate Lancaster, Dr Clau Nader, Dr Emma Yhnell and Andrew Barker
N8 collated the following conclusions in their recap of the event:
Growing consensus across stakeholders – Speakers from academia, libraries, funders and publishers all expressed support for more transparent, cost-effective, and inclusive publishing models. This cross-sector agreement reflects momentum toward systemic change.
Challenges with commercial publishers and metrics – Multiple speakers pointed to ongoing issues: rising costs, reliance on prestige metrics, and publisher opacity around pricing. These challenges disproportionately affect underfunded institutions and researchers, reflecting the importance of the N8’s intervention.
Emerging alternatives and transition models – Promising alternatives are being implemented, such as The Open Journals Collective, that aim to shift the cost burden away from individual researchers and toward community-supported, nonprofit-driven systems.
Lola Furniss reflects on her curation project: ‘Visibility and Resistance: A Curation Honouring the Lives of Working-Class Women in England, 20th Century to Present’, which is now available on the See Yourself on the Shelf webpage. Its accompanying exhibition is located in the University of York’s JB Morrell library, to the right of the entry-way help desk.
Lola Furniss standing in front of the display of books that are part of her curation.
Reflecting upon this curation process, I am compelled by the undertaking of this task as both an intellectually rigorous and profoundly personal endeavour. At its core, the project sought to centre the narratives of working-class women in England from the twentieth century to the present, with an explicit emphasis on intersectionality. While the curation cannot claim to be exhaustive, it aspires to initiate an enduring diversification of the University of York’s library spaces and to reinforce the presence of working-class women’s voices in academic and cultural spaces.
Intersectionality remains at the forefront of decolonising approaches to curation. As theorised by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality illuminates the ways in which systems of oppression, such as patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, and xenophobia interweave and operate to produce compounded forms of marginalisation. Applied here, it prevents the reductive treatment of class or gender as isolated categories, instead recognising how these identities implicate others, including race, sexuality, and ability. This approach tailored the selection process, ensuring the materials reflect the multiplicity of working-class women’s lived realities. In doing so, the curation attempts to resist homogenisation, foregrounding the intersecting structures that both constrain and ignite resistance across different historical and cultural contexts.
During this process, I have explored the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes a valuable archival or scholarly resource. I have included foundational works such as Pamela M. Graves’s Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 and Elizabeth Roberts’s A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 to provide essential historical context. Though, in addition, I included Juno Roche’s A Working-Class Family Ages Badly and Sabeena Akhtar’s edited collection Cut from the Same Cloth? Muslim Women on Life in Britain, and Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns to accentuate the intersectional dimensions of identity, articulated directly by working-class authors. The inclusion of zines, addressed in a dedicated section of the reading list, alongside cultural histories like Selina Todd’s Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution and community-based works such as Speak Out!: A Brixton Black Women’s Group Reader facilitated a multidimensional engagement with the lived realities and artistic protest by working-class women. This approach highlights the value of platforming the complexity of working-class experiences, communicating a powerful, prideful embodiment of resistance.
Close up of Lola’s display
Additionally, in my research I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the features of online archives and websites, with distinctive efforts to support independent publishers and amplify online histories that can be difficult to locate. I also drew upon recommendations from other universities undertaking similar initiatives to diversify their collections, as well as materials from the York and Leeds public libraries. These external resources yielded a wide range of compelling materials that broadened and enriched the curation as a collective body of work.
As I mentioned in my introductory post, there is an impressive political import inherent within the act of curation, making it an imperative task to avoid reductive or inaccurate portrayals of working-class women. This project reinforced the fundamental obligation to foster spaces within academic institutions that validate working-class women’s narratives as crucial to both intellectual discourse and activism. Ultimately, without the women highlighted in this curation, the plight for change would lack critical historical continuity, knowledge through experience, and the perspectives necessary to acknowledge and advance the emancipation against oppressive systemic hierarchies.
View of Lola’s and Angharad’s displays.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the University Library team for their unwavering support and expertise throughout this project. Their guidance was invaluable in navigating the logistical and technical considerations necessary for bringing the curation to fruition, both within the library’s physical display and the LibGuide. I am particularly thankful to Antonio, Ilka, Dave, and Kirsty for their meaningful and constructive guidance during our meetings, and for their dedication to the success of the project; to Kenny and the purchasing team for facilitating the acquisition of my newly selected materials; to Ned for his careful assistance with social media promotion; to Laura and Lydia for their contributions and recommendations with the archival material; to Ben for his willingness to stick with me throughout my many copyright queries; and to Steph and Siobhan for their patience and essential guidance during the LibGuide creation process. The generosity, warmth, and care of each member of the team have been integral to my productivity and execution of this task. I am also indebted to my family for their insight on the topic, for sharing working-class struggle and protest stories throughout my life, and for compelling me to engage thoughtfully with the topics and intricacies of systemic oppression.
Lola and Angharad standing in front of their curation displays.
Looking forward, I envisage this curation as a living collection that invites continual interaction and development by future scholars and students. I hope that it contributes to sustained efforts to create intersectional library collections that are more inclusive, nuanced, and representative. Most importantly, I hope it inspires ongoing critical inquiry into the ways working-class women’s stories are told, preserved, and valued. I encourage you to explore the collection, engage with its materials, and cardinally, contribute to the ongoing work of expanding working-class visibility within academic and cultural spheres. Thank you for your attention, and for taking time out of your day to interact with my curation!
A picture of the whole curation display, featuring two posters, books at varied heights with corresponding blurbs, open poetry books, and QR codes to different media.
I am feeling incredibly bittersweet about my time as a Student Curator coming to an end. I have loved working on this curation, and it has felt incredibly gratifying to pull it all together with the digital Libguide and physical display in the library. I feel as though I have had this curation brewing in the back of my mind for a while, and being given the resources to actually create it has been incredible. I finally got to put my incredibly niche goodreads shelving system to good use!
However, my issue is I really do not want to stop working on this curation. Disability and neurodiversity are quite key to my self identity, and so I consume a lot of content in all forms around it. It is really hard to now turn off my curation brain when I see something on youtube or my for you page, thinking ‘let me just add this’! I hope that this curation keeps living on, with people adding to the curation padlet and sharing their own Disabled joy as well as that featured in the curation.
Setting up the physical display was incredibly fun, and it was great getting to organise it spatially to reflect how my research was carried out. If you visit it in person, you’ll see that there are books, but also little signs with QR codes to videos, art, articles, and ebooks. Lots of these are put in a spot deliberately; such as Alice Wong’s interview QR code going next to her memoir. I really hope that this makes the physical display fun to explore. I have also included a QR code to the Hannah Gadsby standup on my libguide, but don’t blame me if you are laughing next to the Burton.
I have aimed to make the physical display as easy and accessible to peruse as possible. There are ebook versions of physical books/standalone ebooks where possible to allow for reading aloud and changing formats, I have included a wide range of text difficulty, and included social media accounts for low effort perusing. I wanted to make sure there were materials for all spoon levels!
I also wanted to make the physical display and online libguide as similar experiences as possible, so you won’t be disadvantaged if you can’t physically get to the library to view the curation. All the videos and artwork you can view at the physical display are on the libguide. The only thing you need to be in the library for is to borrow the physical books.
On the actual content of the curation, it has definitely shifted from my initial thoughts. I definitely did not expect to find as much incredible poetry as I did, and was incredibly excited by how much Disabled, anti capitalist, political thought I found. I did expect to find many memoirs, and initially I was quite set against not including them. My perception was that Disabled people are often only published in memoirs, as a way to package up Disability and sell it to an abled audience as inspiration. However (from scouring many Goodreads reviews) I believe all the memoirs selected for this curation are incredibly valuable and we can definitely get joy from them too. I really liked the wording of Judith Heumann’s; ‘the unrepentant memoir of a Disability Rights Activist’, and Harriet McBryde Johnson’s ‘Too Late to Die Young’ seems to really stem from a joy for living life being Disabled. Rebekkah Taussig’s memoir ‘Sitting Pretty’ aims to directly refute the media’s one dimensional portrayal of Disability. I therefore thought it would be a disservice to exclude these authors simply for their genre.
The memoir section of the curation is along the back row. Loosely defined as Alice Wong’s memoir sits in the Alice Wong section (I am a bit of a fan…)
Overall, I have strived to include diverse perspectives in the curation. Disability and Neurodiversity are incredibly broad topics themselves, and it was especially necessary to curate an intersectional reading list as experience of Disability is undeniably shaped by race, gender, sexuality, and background. Queer of colour organising is, and has always been, at the heart of the Disability Rights and later Disability Joy movement. I hope I have managed to capture that in my curation.
When purchasing books for my curation, I sometimes struggled with the question ‘is this joyful enough?’. This was particularly true for some books detailing traumatic events, such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s poetry collection Tonguebreaker. I generally ended up including them, as it would feel dishonest to completely ignore any mention of hardship. Tonguebreaker details surviving hatecrime and other traumatic events, and in the midst of it all finding love. I think that encapsulates the theme for me; our resilience and joy in community.
While setting up the physical display, someone came over to talk about her son’s potential ADHD, and whether I had any recommendations. We had a really lovely conversation and it really proved to me the importance of Disabled and neurodivergent spaces and visibility.
This photo shows books from Alice Wong and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. There are QR codes to art and articles linking to the various books, an ebook, and Leah’s poetry collection Tonguebreaker is open.
Finally, I could not have done this curation without help from a brilliant team of people. Thank you to Antonio, Ilka, Dave, and Kirsty for your help and support. Thank you to Ned for posting my many instagram stories, and Ben for answering my many questions about copyright. Steph and Siobhan were incredibly helpful in all things libguides and HTML coding. And thank you to Jessica for setting us up with reading lists!
