About

This qualitative research project explores the relationships between women of colour in Britain and books. The study challenges the notion perpetuated by the predominantly white British publishing industry that women of colour belong to a secondary readership in which we either aren’t interested in books, or have interests too niche to be published; this makes us the ‘other audience’. Whilst articles and recent academic research has criticised how publishers stereotype and other those from racial minorities, there has been no exploration of how people of colour relate to and consume books. Identities and interests of women of colour are pre-determined by publishers and, at present, only those within the industry have been able to assert how we exist. This research aims to critically explore how women of colour relate to books through our own positionalities and values of knowledge. The research’s contribution to knowledge stems from it being novel in directly engaging with readers from minority ethnicities and exploring how we exist as a readership, opposing previous research which has only focussed on industry professionals’, who are predominantly white, input. 

It does so through putting the voices of women at the forefront, both as participants and as a researcher. Through an intersectional feminist framework, principles of Black and indigenous storytelling are applied to interviews and zine-making to explore and disseminate what meanings book hold to us. Through the exploration of our relationships with books, it will not only provide an understanding of what our reading interests are in terms of genres and themes; it will also exemplify and celebrate the ways in which books, as both material objects and forms of consumable media, shape and express our identities and positionalities in life as people with complex, intersectional identities; its significance in academia is centring how we, as women of colour, consume and interact with media from a lens of our own, with our skills, knowledge and voice in a safe space built from core intersectional feminist values and traditions.