King's College London

Archives in Action (AiA) gathers scholars, archivists and community organisations whose work focuses on or is based in West Africa and its diaspora. Its central objective is to explore how materials from the archives of formal decolonization might be put to work in communities in Ghana and the United Kingdom as a resource for ongoing social change and transformation, but without resorting to extractive methods.

At King’s, AiA is anchored in the UKRI-funded project LITAID: Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora. A team-based project, LITAID focuses on cultural production and arts education in Ghana from the 1940s to the 1960s. Understanding decolonization as an ongoing process of political and social change that shapes and is shaped by cultural production in ways that are simultaneously local and transnational, LITAID asks: how did the materials of Ghanaian culture become available for decolonizing projects elsewhere? Pursuing this question, LITAID examines and extends the archival record, bringing renewed visibility to materials from UK institutions with their own colonial legacies, from Ghanaian institutions, and from archives of the African diaspora.

AiA brings together researchers from the LITAID team with archivists who make and manage these archives in the UK and in Ghana; and cultural practitioners in community organisations that seek to facilitate access to them through educational and outreach programmes. Making use of participatory research methods, AiA will address the shared concerns of researchers, archivists, activists and cultural organisations with how collections are made and speak to one another, and what they mean to their various stakeholders, both on the African continent and in the diaspora.