Many people contribute to this blog, including members of the core team, our volunteers, placement students, project partners, researchers; basically anyone with an interest in what we do and a perspective or story to share. For the most part these are one-off contributions, so we’ll tell you at the start of their post a bit about who they are.
We do however have some regular bloggers, whose names you will see crop up again and again across the site. Here’s a bit of info about who we are and what we do:
Hannah Niblett
Hannah established the blog back in 2013 when she was Collections Access Officer at the AIU Centre.
Her blogs have included insider-perspectives on the work of the AIU Centre and reflections on collection management, as well as interesting things from the archive and library that she comes across in the rest of her work. She continues to be an occasional guest blogger.
Hattie completed her MA in American Studies at the University of Manchester in 2018 and has since worked as the Collections Access Assistant at the AIU Centre. This has included creating content for our blog, website and social media platforms, and promoting the AIU Centre’s events. Last year, Hattie created our Hip Hop in the Library study resource.
Hattie’s blog posts include insights into our archive, coverage of our events, and pieces commemorating famous events or figures throughout the history of the fight against racism in the UK.
Alison is The AIU Centre’s Honorary Research Associate, specialising in focused research projects that bring together race relations themes and materials from cultural institutions in the Manchester area. Alison is a historian by training, as well as a qualified coach working in the HE sector. For her, the roles of coach and historian involve using similar skills, including the abilities to see lots of different perspectives, and to pull together reflections based on the ‘stories’ people actually narrate. You can read about her coaching work here. On the history side, she completed her PhD on nineteenth-century American social and political history at the University of Manchester.
Alison blogs about interesting stories that start with the collection, revealing unusual connections between items in our library, archive and beyond. Her posts often reflect on the process of research and she writes posts for our Research Skills series. She makes an occasional appearance as our Roving Reader.
Jo is a freelance writer and artist who has been involved with AIU Centre work since 2010, working on various projects, writing hundreds of book summaries for the online catalogue, processing archive material and oral history transcriptions, and devising the project outline and bid for a Writer in Residence programme which resulted in Kotha & Kantha: Bangladeshi Women’s Memoir Project (2016-17).
Jo does occasional book reviews for us and blogs extensively for other sites, including her own floraliawordsandimages.wordpress.com.
aiucentre.wordpress.com 