Project overview:
Preserving Our Stories is a collaboration between Manchester-based community historian, Linford Sweeney, local collaborators, and a team of scholars and archivists working at the University of Manchester that aims to preserve the oral history of local (African-Caribbean) residents, particularly descendants of the Windrush generation, through the creation of a new collection at the ahmed iqbal ullah race centre. This four-month long project served as a pilot for future heritage work and led to the training of two Black community historians and development of oral histories for inclusion in the Preserving Our Stories archive.
Background:
Over the past nineteen years, Sweeney has built Inspired Histories, a comprehensive programme in Black history which he has delivered to organisations, adults and young people across the city region. Pimblott and Webb have built a strong working relationship with Sweeney through shared commitments to community-based and Black-led archiving and heritage initiatives. Between 2023 and 2024, Sweeney attended two day-long training sessions on community and oral history research methods delivered by the AIU RACE Centre as part of Pimblott’s AHRC grant. In Summer 2024, Pimblott partnered with Sweeney and the AIU RACE Centre to deliver Teaching Black History, a six-week training programme, open mostly to young people of African and African Caribbean heritage who had an interest in researching and teaching Black history within a community context and/or seeking to further their studies on the subject. Sweeney is also a member of Jack Webb’s AHRC-funded research network, Black British History: Local Perspectives, that brings together representatives of local, community Black History groups from across the UK to build capacity to better recover, document and represent the African diaspora experience across these underexamined regional localities. Preserving Our Stories grows out of these pre-existing initiatives and aims to strengthen the local ecology of Black heritage and preservation work and relationships between university-and community-based scholars of African diaspora experience in Manchester.
Future plans:
Pimblott will meet with Sweeney in Autumn 2025 to reflect on the efficacy of the pilot and scope the potential for a future external heritage bid to expand the collection and produce related oral history outputs.
Work undertaken:
In March 2025, Sweeney recruited two aspiring community historians to participate in the Preserving Our Histories project. On April 24, 2025, the trainees attended a bespoke community and oral history training session delivered by Laila Benhaida at the AIU RACE Centre to prepare them to conduct oral history interviews with descendants of the Windrush Generation in Manchester. Trainees were provided with methodological training and equipment, including uni-directional recorders and support in using appropriate software for storing oral interviews. Trainees also reflected on ethical research practice and the process of informed consent. During May and June, Sweeney and the community historians hosted a reminiscence session at Café Nubia in Moss Side. Subsequently, theyworked to identify and recruit interested participants for the oral history project. Interviews were conducted in the community and interviews transcribed in preparation for acquisition to the AIU RACE Centre later this year.