Good afternoon, I am Siobhan, the research assistant for the Searchlight Archive. I am very excited to be working on this project, which is to explore the impact of our teaching using radical and extreme collections upon BAME students. We want to find out whether teaching this material impacts upon module engagement and could therefore impact attainment. 

We recently came back from a conference at De Montfort University, presenting our work on radical pedagogies. Our work was praised as innovative and has spurred us on to research and showcase our radical collections. We are in a privileged position to hold a large and ever growing radical collection here at UoN, and it is important to share it as much as possible.  We do not take radical collections lightly, as they can cause harm if not framed appropriately. Dan and I manage these risks often, with outreach, conference papers and engagement, so will therefore keep this to the front of our planning. 

To kick start the project, Dan and I have been project planning. We have been working out key deadlines, and the setting up of focus groups for students and the community to input into our research. Our focus group work will begin in the next semester, as the rest of this semester will be working on finding out who already engages with radical collections, and creating a database of the findings. We will update the progress with this task in the next blog.