As I’ve already mentioned, I am currently a Heritage Collections Fellow at IASH – the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, at the University of Edinburgh. I’m halfway through my Fellowship, and (hopefully) halfway through my trawl of the Thomas Nelson publishers’ archives in search of correspondence about their music publications in the 1940s to 1950s. The book I’m primarily interested in has presented me with a few surprises and thoughts of new directions to pursue, but I shall plough on through the archives until I am sure I’ve captured every whisper about these four little school books.
This week, we had the Institute’s 55th Anniversary celebrations, with a focus on Decoloniality. The Institute has just concluded a two-year project on this theme. There was also a session on motherhood and reproductive justice.
Now, you’d think, perhaps correctly, that my Scottish song book and music education focus has little connection with either decoloniality or motherhood. But I did put a lot of effort into broadening the scope of the music collection to include more music by women and composers of colour, whilst I was a Performing Arts librarian at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, so I was keen to find out what other scholars in more directly related disciplines have been doing.
I think it’s fair to say I felt a bit overawed! IASH is very interdisciplinary, so there were contributions from all corners of the humanities, and by scholars with far more extensive experience in their fields than I have in mine. But there were contributions from the performing arts, and from heritage collections and archives – I felt more comfortable in these areas, and a bit less out of my depth.
I stayed in Edinburgh overnight to make it less of a rush from Glasgow for the second morning.
In the final session, with contributions from past and present directors, I was impressed by the sheer reach and achievements of this amazing institution, and both proud and humbled to be a Fellow here.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!
In the context of Robert Burns’s poem, those lines are exhorting us not to get above ourselves, but taken in a different context, they perhaps offer reassurance that others see something in us that we can’t necessarily see ourselves.
‘They thought I was worthy to be a Fellow – in a very competitive application process?’, I mused. But yes, they did indeed select me, which is a vote of confidence in itself. Sometimes, you need validation by others – it’s hard to be objective about oneself!
Image at top of post: The Edinburgh Futures Institute
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 