BLAST, Birago Day & The Power of the Connective
BLAST is a pop-up festival and community engagement platform based in Birmingham, UK, that fuses the power of science arts and Black culture to bring people together to exchange knowledge and ideas, and collaborate for change. BLAST is led by its Founder and Director, Anita Shervington, a community organiser and engagement strategist who has been working at the intersection of science, social justice, culture and creativity to improve outcomes in Black and African Caribbean communities in Birmingham and beyond for well over a decade.
Anita operated as a Co-Investigator on Engaging Environments, having initially connected as a Critical Friend of the project, creating community engagements and offering input and feedback on the programme from an impacted-community perspective. Anita is a Churchill Fellow, having travelled to the USA, Canada and Guyana to explore community-led approaches to building ‘science capital’ through arts, culture and philanthropy. She subsequently completed a Wellcome Trust Fellowship building on this, exploring how science can be driven by social justice and powered by inclusive, equitable and relevant research.
As an element of Anita’s work with Engaging Environments, BLAST collaborated with Natty Mark Samuels, Founder of African School in Oxford, as part of the inaugural and ongoing celebration of Black and African Caribbean folklore, Birago Day, honouring the work of Birago Diop.
Here, Anita shares insights into the event and beyond that, culturally responsive community engagement, infrastructure, funding, and sustainability across key research themes.
The Power of the Connective: Birago Day and beyond
BLAST stands for Black Life, Arts, Science and Technology. We are a community engagement platform and a connective network which has been built over many years, across interactions, events and initiatives that address key themes and issues within the STEM sector. This connective is an emergent space which intentionally creates opportunities for communities, focusing not only on what is not currently being done within public engagement, but what needs to be done.
This means our work is vision and mission-driven rather than simply being reactive or attempting to replicate an ‘accessible’ version of what already exists. We want to change the systems and narratives that hold inequalities in place and this requires a culture of reimagining.
This connective principle overlaps with BLAST’s different loops of engagement, across research interests, which enables dynamic involvement of partners and participants in activities that are responsive to specific needs, concerns, and curiosities. This is essential to be responsive to communities and to align with BLAST’s social impact and sustainability agendas, as well as sector-wide agendas from funders and higher education institutions.
BLAST’s work with Natty Mark Samuels of African School in Oxford on Birago Day is a small scale (fractal) example in a much larger ecosystem, of the power of this connective and the inclusion of different kinds of partners for the purpose of culturally affirming, relevant and responsive community engagement.
Birago Day was conceived of by Natty Mark Samuels as an annual celebratory event of African and Caribbean storytelling and folklore, in memory of the work of Birago Diop, a Senegalese poet, diplomat, veterinarian and storyteller. This aligned with BLAST’s focus in its connection with the African diaspora, as well as key themes within Engaging Environments, such as storytelling, our environment, capacity building and inclusive engagement.
As part of a series of celebrations internationally, BLAST designed and delivered a promenade-style event at the Think Thank Science Museum in Birmingham. The activities were focused on how storytelling and heritage activities can connect us to our natural world, the sustainability of our environment, and themes of cultural resistance.
Listen to Things
More often than Beings.
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen to the wind,
To the sighs of the bush;
This is the ancestors breathing.
– From Les Souffles by Birago Diop
The programme included Natty running ‘The Moonlit Classroom’, which incorporated readings of traditional stories and poetry with audience participation, followed by musical performances and discussion from reggae singer and veterinarian Dr Niquet Goldson, presentations from Zoology students Aaron Matthew and Amelia Shervington-White, and a panel discussion across key themes. There was also a Capoeira display, which is a Brazilian martial art disguised as a dance performance, so that it could be preserved by Black Brazilians as a form of cultural resistance, as it was repeatedly outlawed and its performers persecuted. As the event moved through different areas of the museum, it was accompanied by traditional African drumming from renowned drummer and musician, Asher B.
The ability for BLAST’s connective to bring different people into these engagements is what cultivates multidisciplinary, intergenerational and regenerative opportunities. For example, with younger people and university students, there are chances to gain work experience, mentorship, and the ability to connect with Black leaders and role models within STEM, cultural, and creative sectors, that can provide inspiration for studies and future careers. More broadly, this model of the connective is creating the conditions for Black communities to utilise, and scrutinise, science, arts, and culture, for social change.
Disparity of Infrastructure – Institutions and Communities
One of the main barriers to community engagement with science, technology and arts is the disparity in infrastructure when compared with large institutions and organisations, which is linked to an ongoing lack of access to resource and funding. Whilst this disparity remains, the status quo will not change, and community organisations will not be able to work with universities or funders from a position of power.
The traditional ‘top-down’ approach to community engagement, whereby institutions dictate to communities how an engagement is carried out, what challenges are being addressed, and potential ‘solutions’, perpetuates long-standing systemic issues. Institutions hold significant power and infrastructure which tends to mean they are trusted by funders to deliver on projects in favour of smaller, community-based organisations. A by-product of this is often that the benefit of these engagements stays within the already powerful institutions – in the forms of further funding, research, reports, REF submissions, journals articles, citations, etc. – whilst far less consideration is given to ongoing and sustainable benefits to communities.
This needs to be addressed, and it can be done by developing the capacities and capabilities of community organisations, building a community-based infrastructure, so that we can work with institutions and organisations on a more even footing.
Black and minoritised communities have had to fund their own inclusion through sweat equity due to this lack of infrastructure. Despite being underfunded and underrepresented, the impact is still there and there is an entire workforce at the community level which has been taking a ‘bottom-up’ approach to engagement for years. As a community, we are always focused on filling the gaps, deactivating the traps, and working towards the world that we want to see and for our children to live in, which can be abundant and filled with opportunities for our communities to thrive. We need investment in the people and the organisations that are already doing this work, regardless of any inclusion agendas.
Funding the Missing Middle
Another key aspect of equitable community engagement is the role of community organisers, or ‘The Missing Middle’. The people in these roles are absolutely essential to these partnerships, as they are the connective glue on which engagement is built and provide proximity as members and gatekeepers of the communities which they serve. Organisers have trusted relationships built over time and they have a vested interest in the outcomes for their communities, but their positions within partnerships and in the wider research ecosystem are precarious and undervalued.
The cost of bringing people together in equitable and inclusive ways is often overlooked in community-centred or more traditional forms of research, but is extremely challenging and complex. The ability to bring people together in meaningful ways is integral to building an equitable and inclusive STEM ecosystem, which is a desire recognised by NERC and UKRI.
The Missing Middle is a route to ensuring that these partnerships and connections are safe spaces without extraction and without damaging or destroying existing relationships and networks. Through our work, we have learned that the absence of these ‘connectors’ often means that more damage can be done ‘at the coal face’ if researchers and communities are not able to co-develop and co-create partnerships together. We are fully aware of the reality of people’s lives within their communities, how that impacts their engagement, and how we might work with that to create equitable and progressive spaces.
Sustainability, of people, planet and culture
Central to BLAST’s social impact agenda and the key focuses of Engaging Environments are recognising the intersectionality of the issues we want to address through our work. Environmental and social justice are extremely complex issues, requiring intersectional solutions that are responsive to people, planet and culture.
BLAST utilises a ‘flipped engagement’ model, whereby our starting point is within the community, and we aim to shift power towards the community by creating the conditions that empower and enable people to become shapers and leaders of these engagements. This incorporates a number of approaches and philosophies to support our vision for sustainable community development.
A few examples of these are, firstly, targeted universalism, which is the process of establishing universal goals for all groups from which socially and culturally responsive strategies and policies are developed to ensure equitable outcomes for specific groups that are marginalised. Another is a collective impact approach, with a common agenda, shared measurement, and mutually reinforcing activities, amongst other elements. We also apply the philosophy of Sankofa, a West African concept, which means “to retrieve”, whereby we look back at what has best served us from the past to make positive progress in the future.
We believe that by applying these principles and utilising the power of the connective, we can create the world that we want to see for our future.
Credits & Further Information
Co-author: Anita Shervington, Founder & Director of BLAST
Co-author: Matt Burrows, Policy & Communications Officer, Engaging Environments, University of Reading
Natty Mark Samuels, Founder, African School, Oxford