Demographic

Age: 20

Gender identity: She/her

Race: 2nd Generation Nigerian-Canadian

Indigenous: No

Class: Middle Class

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): Muslim

Education: Currently at Kwantlen College and plans to transfer to SFU in her final year

Language: English, French, Yoruba

Personal responsibilities: Aging Mother, has a little sister she hopes to support

Location: Born and raised in Surrey and commutes to Vancouver daily for work and school. Visits Nigeria every 5 years or so.

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Collaboration Annotation – Annotator, Annotorious
• Flagging Harmful Language – Description-Audit
• IIIF – Mirador
• Visualization – Gist

Brief Biography

Fatima is a second generation Canadian-Nigerian and an avid learner. She is a maker and thinker at her core, and spends most of her time reading, making, or with her mother and younger sister. Fatima is a great friend, research assistant and colleague – dependable, kind and always willing to lend a hand. Her art practice and current research revolves around representation, ancestry and Black cultural production. She has a particular interest in noting the histories of Blackness across these lands, and how they might be connected to her home country of Nigeria. In her recent research, she has come across her institution’s archives as well as that of the city. She has noted that representation is very limited and her concerted research has been fruitless. Visits online and in person have brought up very little, and Fatima is unable to piece together the small pieces to create a full and coherent story. She is committed to righting this wrong and making the archives a more accessible and representative space, for all.

Character description

Fatima has found asking for help difficult because of the implicit biases a lot of those in positions of power to help often have towards her. However, she is often doing independent research to find solutions to problems she comes across, often spending hours combing through reddit forums and youtube videos as well.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Fatima recently got deeper into her arts practice and received a BC arts grant to develop that practice further. She has also recently been interested in her history, the histories of Black immigrants on the continent and uncovering the deeply underreported histories of Black people in the province.

Community affiliations: Fatima has strong ties to friends and family both in Surrey and at her university. She is an outgoing and inquisitive person who delves into her interpersonal curiosities with kindness. She has particular and more recent ties to artists and researchers in her school.

Represented in archives: No. Fatima is a black muslim woman, and rarely sees black people in any capacity represented in the archives. On the rare occasion they are represented, there is little metadata or context to those black people and their experiences.

Professional affiliations: Fatima works as an RA at her institution.

Access needs and mobility: Fatima has dyslexia.

Motivations

Why:

• Fatima knows archives can be useful spaces.
• Fatima knows many researchers, thinkers, makers whose work is not included in archives – she can only imagine those she doesn’t know.
• Fatima is infinitely curious and wants to make the work, educational spaces and learning more equitable and accessible for people like her younger sister.
• Fatima refuses the idea of intellectual segregation or isolation which archives can often perpetuate.

Frustrations

Barriers: Fatima has no idea how to access the archives or what archives to access. She had to go in person to access the Surrey library archives which is pretty difficult because of how much she works. She also finds there to be a lot of terminology for using the archives that she doesn’t have any reference for and that adds extra steps to understanding the archives.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: Fatima is skilled with most hardware, and currently uses a macbook and an Ipad which she got for school and for art making.

Software: Fatima is well versed in all things google, mac and windows. She is very capable when learning new technology.

Network connectivity: She has reliable internet and a mobile plan for data.

Experience with archival tools: Little to no experience.

Experience with archival frameworks: No experience.

Comfort with learning technology: Very comfortable.

Goals

What do they want to do: They want to use the archives as a medium to better understand the history of black people in the province, and the impact they have had on British Columbia. She wants to draw from images, text and video to contribute to the creation of work that is able to disseminate this information and new knowledge in a more accessible way

What relationship do they want to the archives: A positive and interactive experience: Fatima would ideally want the archives to be easily explorable and have metadata that provides context to the archival works because she finds that with racialized folks there is usually more to their place in the history than is usually seen. Fatima wants to use the archives like a library for a broad spectrum of information that will inform her art, her research and the work she hopes to do when she graduates.