The Common Wind

A potential theme for future work is 'The Common Wind'. Inspired by Julius Scott's groundbreaking work on how information flowed through the Atlantic, shared by enslaved people, free Black sailors and people of colour, the project participants drew a link to the uses of contemporary social media to resist violent racist "policing" of public spaces. Information networks play a key role in connecting Black people and in generating resistance to oppression.

This leads onto thinking about how digital scholarship can not just allow information to be conveyed to an audience, but how interaction with digital scholarships can allow museum audiences to practice and engage with the ways that information and social networks were used and are used both to assert white supremacy (the fugitive slave advertisements, etc) and used to subvert and resist slavery (through rumours of rebellion, networks to aid fugitives.

• Create an exercise using social media which allows people to connect the 'common wind' with social media campaigning today.
• Demonstrate how fugitive slave advertisements can enhance museum exhibitions. Not through statistics but by focusing on individual biographies and portraits.
• Understand social media not just as means of communicating museum initiatives and goals to passive consumers, but as places of interpretation and organising.

One workshop member shared a photo of the Special Collections objects that was a topic of the workshop discussion. An edited version of the Bible, specially printed for use on slave plantations. On Twitter, the photo was shared widely: https://twitter.com/gbgandad/status/1220533072535400450?s=20 -- how can this kind of discussion and engagement be harnessed and fed back into the interpretation of this object. In an object biography, how relevant are comments on social media?