Decolonise UoM

If you’re not involved in computer science in some way, you might not know that it’s common for the term “master/slave” to be used to refer to a variety of concepts in computer science. The term has a range of uses, but one of the main ones is where there is a primary copy of some data (the “master”) and various replicas of that data (referred to as “slaves”). When I was taught to use this term as a computer science undergraduate in 2010 I was taken aback. It seemed unclear and unnecessarily upsetting. Why were we making casual references to the horrific practice of slavery in a lecture on databases? The origins of the use of “master - slave” as a technical computer science term are unclear. The first use I could find was in a paper from 1959, which uses it as a metaphor alongside the more self-explanatory “primary - secondary” when discussing a method of linking two computers together. It comes up again in 1964 when researchers at Dartmouth College (an Ivy League university in the Uni...

Language for describing Black, Asian, ethnic minority, refugee and migrant communities often changes and is frequently contested.  In this piece, we will use the term Global Majority or racially minoritised where we need to refer to Black, Asian, ethnic minority, refugee and migrant communities collectively. We will describe specific communities wherever we can.   The RACE Centre Reception Desk based in Manchester Central Library Who we are The  Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race, Archives and Community Engagement) Centre  is a specialist library and archive focusing on the experiences and stories of Black, Asian, global majority, refugee and migrant communities. We are part of the University of Manchester Library but based in Manchester Central Library.  We work very closely with our sister organisation, the  Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust  to a shared vision and mission: Our vision  is an inclusive, equally represented and racially just societ...