Over the summer, Student Library Curator Audrey Fredua-Agyeman launched A Sonic Archive: Reclaiming the 'Sub-Normal' Narrative, an exhibition examining the 1970s Educationally Sub-Normal scandal and its lasting impact on Black Caribbean communities in Britain. The projected featured three poster display boards, a curated reading list, newly purchased books for the library collection, and an interactive board where staff and students could share their own reflections. Find out more about Audrey's work here: Student Library Curator – Loughborough Library
Audrey's Blog:
Summer is ending. A new academic year is beginning, and with it, a renewed chapter in Loughborough's commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
This internship gave us time to look for voices whose history still hasn't been fully heard.
Over the summer, I led a project examining the collision between Britain's education system and the oppression faced by Black Caribbean children. A Sonic Archive: Reclaiming the 'Sub-Normal' Narrative uncovers the 1970s Educationally Sub-Normal (ESN) scandal, in which Black Caribbean children were wrongly labelled as intellectually deficient. My work traces how linguistic standards and educational classifications were weaponised against Black Caribbean dialect and sets out to dismantle the dominant frameworks that decided what counted as intellect in the first place.
My deliverables consisted of a poster display board, a curated reading list, and a digital output uploaded to the Loughborough University Research Repository.
Constructing the Reading List
Curating the reading list was one of the parts of this project I’m most proud of, and one of the hardest.
I designed an Excel model to store and track potential themes; Sound and Resistance, Language, and Linguistics, and scan resources on a continuous basis, shortlisting them by relevance. Some walls I hit more than once: ESN records locked behind time and inaccessibility, work on Dread Talk buried behind firewalls and limited digital access, poems in Creole and Patois I had to go looking for rather than simply find.
This summer also opened doors I didn't expect. I reached out to directly, across linguistics, African American Vernacular English, and beyond to expertise in the field for support and guidance on resources to incorporate. Among the new books I brought into the library's collection: Black Voices: An anthology of ACER'S Black Young Writers Competition, The Caribbean Artists Movement, History of the Voice, each one answers the same question: what does it mean for a nation that prides itself on multiculturalism to hold a darker past? A nation once called the Motherland, whose promise of liberation proved as impossible as it was promised.
Some of my favorite research hours weren't spent reading at all they were spent watching. Documentaries on YouTube traced sound systems' journey across the Atlantic, from Jamaica to Britain, and it was there, more than almost anywhere else, that I understood just how powerful this culture was to the Black Caribbean community that carried it.
Designing the Display
I don't call myself an artist, but I had a vision, I was determined to see it through - even if it took three attempts to get there.
My first idea was a sound station, a place to hear dub poems, Dread Talk, and reggae's own rhythm, not just read about them. It didn't survive in contact with reality; limited resources made sure of that. My second idea followed close behind: a display built entirely around the dub poets themselves: Mikey Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, their words sitting alongside Creole phrases drawn not just from Jamaican Patois, but Haitian, Grenadian and beyond. That idea didn't make it to the final board either, but it didn't fail so much as it led me somewhere. It was the bridge between what I'd first imagined and what I actually built: a final display combining archival imagery with a newspaper-style layout, carrying the same voices and language I'd been circling all along, now given a shape that could finally hold them.
The Experience
Working alongside the Library staff this summer, particularly my line managers, Kat Halliday and Emma Hibbert made this project possible in ways I couldn't have managed alone. Their support, and their willingness to let this project go somewhere genuinely difficult, meant I never had to make this history smaller to make it comfortable.
Completing this internship is something I'm proud of, not just for what it produced, but for what it asked me. I came into this wanting to validate a history that's too often left unheard. I'm leaving it with a reading list, a display, and a project that, I hope, does exactly that.
Why This Matters
If the only account of ESN is the label itself, the children it affected remain defined by an institution's mistake perpetuating the same racism Black Caribbean children still face in classrooms today.
Recovering the other half of that story, the sound, the poetry, and the language doesn't just correct the record, it exposes exactly who that label was really protecting. That's what this exhibition tries to do: not replace one label with another but let the other half of the story finally speak for itself.
But even now, this history hasn't fully closed. It has only reshaped.