Kelly Foster

Kelly Foster headshot
Image by Whose Knowledge?, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Kelly is the Liberatory Archives and Memory Program Associate at Whose Knowledge?. She is a public historian and open knowledge advocate, including as a Wikimedian and chapter lead for Creative Commons UK. She is from a working class African-Jamaican family who settled in the UK in the 1950s. She has worked with community/independent archives in London for over 15 years, specialising in oral history and histories of liberatory traditions of the African Diaspora; part of her practice is as a walking tour guide of London’s Black and working-class histories. She is a founding member of TRANSMISSION, a collective of archivists and historians of African descent. Her approach is centred around “Black digital practice” — hacking into systems where we were “never meant to survive”. When not organising to support open knowledge, Kelly is thinking about heraldry and bananas.