How do we use collections that address challenging aspects of history to begin critical conversations with new and existing audiences? How should we support our staff to channel their expertise into new ways of engaging? How do we embed this into our practice?

It goes without saying that all collections can be challenging, depending on their content and the people using them. In recent years, however, there has been a shift within the profession away from the concept of the archivist or librarian as a passive gateway towards a critical re-evaluation of the many ways in which our processes, from collecting to cataloguing to engagement, can be biased and restrictive.

This paper will centre on Prejudice in Power, a UCL project that consists of a range of co-creation, community and academic initiatives that focus on our holdings to respond to the university’s historic role in promoting eugenics. We will highlight wider activity that has been put into place to encourage and support our work with collections of this type. Our paper will look at how we have used collections to open up challenging conversations, worked with new audiences to create different dialogues and started to put structures in place to support staff and researchers.
Working in different ways with new audiences has meant asking ourselves uncomfortable questions about our current approaches to areas of activity such as education, collection management and cataloguing. We have had to find ways to use these experiences in our day-to-day activities and to embed them into our thinking across the range of professional practice. In our paper, we will share some of the lessons we have learned as we have started on this journey.

1. Recent publications in this area include Crilly, Jess and Everitt, R. Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries (London: Facet, 2023), Prescott, Andrew, and Alison Wiggins (eds), Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction (2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Dec. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198829324.001.0001, accessed 13 Jan. 2025.

For my Master's dissertation, I surveyed accredited archives within the UK for their approach to repatriation policies and procedures. I asked whether repatriation policies were in place, if they had been used before, what the respondents' concerns regarding repatriation were and offered respondents the opportunity to share additional thoughts on the topic of returning contested documents to communities outside the UK.

Archival repatriation is hotly debated and has been a contentious topic for years. In the wake of James Lowry and his collaborators' 'Displaced Archives' and 'Disputed Archival Heritage', the ethical dilemmas of holding another country's archive, and the difficult moral questions that need to be asked when repatriation is considered have been thrust into the centre of the archival field.

In this talk, I will be introducing the findings of my survey and the different policies and viewpoints archives within the UK hold. I examine the reactions and strategies suggested by these archives and lastly, I conclude this talk by arguing that we need to take a more open and honest approach to repatriation, if we want to find realistic solutions for the future.

With ARA's theme this year, I will suggest new ways of approaching repatriation and consider both the merits and flaws in the current policies and attitudes.