Ife Thompson was the closing panellist for the Digital Arts and Preservation Conference 2026 (DPASSH 2026) in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Her panel, titled “The European challenge of broadening languages held in digital repositories”, sat at the intersection of law, language, memory, and the digital spaces where culture is now being stored, reshaped, and sometimes erased.

In her contribution, Ife spoke from her practice as a movement lawyer working within Black linguistic justice, drawing on her recent casework, including Jamila A 2025. She reflected on how Black British English language speakers face constant language discrimination in formal spaces due to a lack of recognition of it being a language. This lack of recognition often directly affects which languages are seen as important to document and transmit ideas to the future.

But Ife also spoke about the joyful resistance of language speakers who refuse to wait for permission to document their art, thoughts, music, books, and dramas in Black British English, and encouraged the creation of community spaces of archival resistance to ensure that they document and preserve our archives using BBE.

She lastly shared insights from her ongoing linguistic research into writing her debut book on Black British English, highlighting how Black language speakers are actively reclaiming digital and creative spaces on their own terms.