My summer as an ERI/PS2 fellow began with a chaotic accident and ended up being one of the most generative research experiences of my life. I went to London to spend three weeks at the George Padmore Institute with Robert Robinson, with whom I am working on a project about the educational and cultural dimensions of the Black left in London from the 1970s to the 1990s. However, right before we got to London, a pipe burst causing water damage to the ceiling and closing the archive for the summer. What were we going to do with our time in London? The pressure to stay on schedule and be productive academic researchers weighed on us, but we resisted this pressure and in doing so changed how I viewed productivity.
While we pivoted to spending more time in the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, looking at the papers of organizations such as the Pagnell Street Youth and Community Centre, people like Gerlin Bean and Sybil Phoenix, and publications including Grassroots and Race Today, we did not have an exclusively archive driven trip. Instead, we met with community organizers and scholar activists in pubs, cafes, and by a lovely canal running through the campus of Queen Mary University of London. We talked with them about the materials we’d been working with in the archive and they told us about the movement work they are involved with in London today, from maintaining an anarchist archive in a Black squat to researching police torture for a public facing report for an abolitionist organization. In these conversations, we began to connect the past and present, understanding the archival materials in a different, more politically alive, way through their resonance with anti-racist organizing in London today. This newfound political community gave us a greater sense of purpose as militant scholars, and we are excited to return to the Padmore next summer, understanding the materials more deeply than we would’ve if we’d been able to visit the archive this summer as planned.
Author
Lucien Baskin
Lost & Found Archival Research Fellow
PS2 Public Research Fellow
Lucien Baskin is a doctoral student in Urban Education at the Grad Center researching
abolition, social movements, and the university. Their dissertation focuses on histories of
solidarity and organizing at CUNY. Lucien’s writing has been published in outlets such as
Truthout, Society & Space, The Abusable Past, and Mondoweiss. Currently, they serve as co-
chair of the American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies Caucus, are an inaugural
Freedom and Justice Institute fellow at Scholars for Social Justice, and work as a media and
publicity fellow at Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. They
organize with Graduate Center for Palestine and are a (strike-ready!) rank-and-file member of
the PSC.
