About this Event
Breaking Archival Silences: Reframing Diaspora Narratives in the UK
Event Proposal – London Edition
Date: 2 May 2026 – 5.30pm
Location: Poplar Union
Organised by: Alberta Sinani and Rina Limoni
Where do our stories begin? And why are diasporas so often represented as homogeneous groups?
With the aim of challenging and heterogenising dominant narratives, Alberta Sinani and Rina, through Diasporas Speaking, have launched a series of events titled Breaking Archival Silences. This initiative seeks to move beyond narrow and simplified discourses, foregrounding the multiplicity of experiences, voices, and conditions that shape diaspora stories.
The London edition centres on the questions:
What do we know about the UK diaspora beyond the idea of living in a metropole? How has the UK diaspora been shaped from the 1990s to today, and how has it been influenced by this geography? How is everyday life shaped in the UK for our diaspora?
Approach
This event explores the politics and poetics of archives in shaping diasporic memory and identity.
Archives are never neutral, they mirror structures of power, politics, and culture, determining whose stories are preserved and whose are marginalised or erased. For the Kosovar-Albanian diaspora, the act of creating and locating archives, both in Kosovo and across the UK, becomes a critical way of reclaiming narrative agency.
We approach diaspora not only through histories of conflict and displacement but also through the quiet continuities of everyday life. These lived experiences reveal resilience, adaptation, and enduring connections across time and place.
We are particularly interested in:
Social media as a living archive, where fragments of memory circulate, evolve, and require contextualisation to retain depth.
Personal archives, family photographs, letters, and everyday objects, as intimate acts of resistance and remembrance.
Storytelling, oral histories, and film as mediums through which emotion, memory, and experience take lasting form.
Migration as layered histories of displacement and belonging shaped by geography, policy, and community formation in the UK since the 1990s.
Community-based activism and archiving as a collaborative and participatory practice that nurtures shared authorship.
Archiving as imagination, a forward-looking act that shapes futures grounded in memory, care, and collective hope.
Programme
Introduction
Rina Limoni
Presentation
Dafina Paca
Panel Discussion
Alberta Sinani
Kaltrina Pashtriku
Arbnora Selmani
Input: Narrative Solidarity: Collective Storytelling as a Theory of Change
Alberta Sinani – Our stories build solidarity by default. How do we facilitate them?
After a short introduction into how our own stories can facilitate solidarity within many different diasporic communities, guests are invited to hold their own stories ready. Bring your own pictures from your family archives, go into a personal search before the event, ask your grandmother/grandfather/auntie/uncle, search for your most pressing question of why some aspect of your diasporic life is the way it is. You might find some answers and stories, you’ve never heard. And those we want to hear! Share them with us at our event, we will collect them through a digital tool and collect them as our precious and protected community archive!
--Aim--
Through this gathering, we aim to open space for critical reflection and dialogue around diasporic histories in the UK, foregrounding complexity, plurality, and agency. By engaging with archives, formal, informal, and imagined, we seek to challenge dominant narratives and co-create new ways of understanding diaspora as dynamic, situated, and human.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Poplar Union, 2 Cotall Street, London, United Kingdom
USD 0.00
