Nicola Thomas and Ian Cook:

One of the ways in which we like to work is through kind of creative assessments and enabling us to kind of let our imaginations unroll, and to use a research-informed way of doing that. And we've created an assessment which reinvents the blue plaque, which is quite a kind of activist gorilla memorialization approach, which others have done (like David Olusoga) to kind of reveal hidden histories and challenge what we see as the authorized heritage discourse, which kind of tends to glamorize the white men in society who do ‘great good things’. So in Exeter, we set the challenge of asking our students to uncover hidden histories which reveal these colonial relationships, and then playfully work with the idea of a building plan, which is there to commemorate someone, placed on the side of a building, and we asked them to reimagine the blue plaques. And the idea of that blue plaque is it says that this person lived here, or they visited here at this particular time as famous person. So it's really important for again, for us his job for is that the plaques are actually in the place where things happen. So it's making a very...so the idea is you might walk through a city like Exeter, and you might every now and again, spot blue plaque here, another one over here, you know, that kind of thing. And you think, okay, this is taking me back in time in this place to something where somebody made some kind of meaningful contribution to the city. So the question that we kind of are asking is like, okay, the authorized heritage, discourses, is prioritizing through whoever chooses these blue plaques, this kind of meaning, whereas for us, a lot of the wealth that created parts of the city, for example, came out of colonialism, these big kind of built these big houses, all kinds of university parts of the university and the land and these names that are on street names, or the names of prominent buildings, these are often the names of people who made a fortune out of colonialism and then brought the money back and invested it here.

… So just down the road from the university, there is a small grocery co-op shop and superstore, mini superstore. And the house next to this is Rose Cottage [from Ian: Rose cottage]. Thank you, Ian! And Dahlia Graham was a formerly enslaved woman who worked at Rose Cottage as a house servant. She came to Exeter from we think, southern United States and arrived just after UK abolition and slavery, and she, you know, lived in Exeter for decades and eventually she died in the work house – which meant that she didn't have great resources at the time. But you know, she had this long life and we love the fact that one of our students decided that Dahlia Graham deserved a plaque; you know, what an amazing woman’s life to celebrate in Exeter on a street where people just walk past all the time -- but wouldn't think twice that there's a really important kind of hidden history. And this is really key for the kind of the kind of Black histories of Exeter. But also to enable this kind of challenge about Exeter being quite a white space to be challenged. Exeter has had a long Black history over hundreds of years. So but it's not visible. So having Dahlia on the street is really key.