This is a webspace in which to capture some of the thoughts and potential projects emerging from an AHRC-funded network on collaboration between digital projects and cultural institutions. Participating institutions in the network include:
Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights
National Museum of African-American History and Culture
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition
The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford
The aim of the project is to bring together digital scholarship on fugitives from slavery and with museums interested in exploring the history of slavery in their collections. In the first meeting, held at Aston University, Birmingham, participants identified two major issues:
- First, that museum collections databases and labeling did not reflect the histories of slavery and empire embedded in the objects. These omissions are coded into the databases and metadata which describes museum collections.
- Second, that digital scholarship projects lacked an emotive register, that would help people connect with the individual agency of the enslaved and the human stories being told. Click on a workshop title to see more about what happened at each event.
In the second meeting, held at the Yale Centre for British Art (with support from the Gilder Lehrman Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition), participants:
- Engaged with a walking tour of the city aimed at challenging forms of institutional racism.
- Experimented with co-writing and curating an instrument of coercion and control associated with enslavement in the UK.
- Exchanged knowledge about digital projects related to slavery with a group of community activists and educators.
In the third meeting, at the University of Glasgow, participants:
- Took a critical walking tour of the Kelvingrove Museum, which highlighted how narratives of fugitivity could be counter-posed to museum displays about the wealth generated by slavery.
- Organised a community listening event to brainstorm new ideas for the Scotland-based Museum of Empire, Slavery and Migration.
- Discussed artist and student-led interventions into museum objects and how these could be better incorporated, on a more permanent footing, into museums.