About

Although recent scholarly work has begun to address the urgent cultural ramifications of colonial legacies which actively erase Indigenous and local knowledge systems, their cultural heritage, and collective identity, the Scottish Gypsy Travellers (SGT) from the Southwest borderlands have not received such valuable academic attention. Existing ‘in contradiction to hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge’ systems and rendered obsolete and valueless within racial capitalism, SGT are currently situated within the most disadvantaged ethnic group in contemporary society. Many use modes of hiding and concealing their identity to avoid such debilitating, negative inscription. My family were SGT who avoided stigmatisation by keeping our genealogy secret and disavowing our ancestry. I draw on multiple archival resources to identify and claim my ‘radical ancestry’, firstly by revealing it and then beginning to forge empowering affiliations with other ‘insubordinate knowledge’ systems and pluralising knowledge more widely. By working with and contributing to the decolonising and feminist relation building tools of re-sounding, re-visioning, and re-membering I link the spectre of colonisation and epistemic violence that haunts the archives and my family. My practice-based research will retrieve and revalue the profound ‘relational and connective knowledges’ of Scottish Gypsy Travellers through critical archival interventions, place-based approaches, experimental filmmaking and literary practices. By activating ‘a genealogy of revolt’ that defies enclosure, I seek to practice and reinstate SGT poetic knowledge as a potent force of resistance and liberatory potential.  Thus, I pay homage to an absent history and a silenced ancestral sonic lifeworld through a ‘ritual of archival reclamation’.