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Research led by Paul Basu at UCL has explored cultural heritage in post-conflict development in Sierra Leone. The 2009-12 Reanimating Cultural Heritage project (RCH) has engaged in a sustained programme of outreach, advocacy, and capacity building in Sierra Leone's cultural and educational sectors. With partners in the UK and Sierra Leone, it has developed an innovative digital resource connecting diasporas of museum objects, images and sounds with diasporas of people, and provides new access to collections. RCH has contributed to the reanimation of Sierra Leone's National Museum and has mobilised cultural heritage as a wider social resource.
Research by the University of Reading's Kate Allen has led to innovative strategies to enable access to, and enhance the experience of, museum and heritage sites for people with learning disabilities. Uniquely, this research has involved working with this user group as co-researchers in on-site museum workshops, to develop interactive electronics that activate objects from the collections as an alternative to conventional interpretation for all visitors. As well as the development of interactive exhibits and displays, the impact of this pioneering work includes the direct experience of researchers and museum staff participating in workshops and the dissemination of these new ideas and methods to a range of practitioners.
DU researchers have delivered their innovative model of participatory action research (PAR) with Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums Service (TWAM, a major regional museum service in the North east, comprising seven museums and galleries) to further social inclusion and deepen participation from socially marginalised groups. Research findings have led to: (1) enhanced income generation for TWAM, with bids citing DU research bringing in more than £0.5m at a time of shrinking resource for the museum sector; (2) the development of a major new museum gallery, which opened in July 2013; and (3) changes to professional practice consequent upon intensifying the practice of participatory working within TWAM.
The History Department at York has a long-standing commitment (embodied in the work of James Walvin, Simon Smith, Douglas Hamilton, Henrice Altink and Geoff Cubitt) to path-breaking research into the history and memory of transatlantic slavery. Our researchers have worked closely with museums and educational practitioners to establish a `virtuous circle' in which research: (i) influences the content of heritage and educational presentations; (ii) reflects on those presentations, gauging public response and prompting stakeholder debate; (iii) provides constructive feedback to museums and others. This impact case study shows how research by members of the Department has contributed to each stage of this process. Professor James Walvin's research publications from 1993 until his retirement in 2005 revealed how slavery has shaped the nature of contemporary British society, a body of work that significantly contributed to the slave trade's inclusion in the National Curriculum in 2008. In addition to his on-going record as an exhibition curator, historical advisor and commentator on slavery, he advised and helped create the York AHRC-funded `1807 Commemorated' project (2007-9), principle investigator Laurajane Smith (Archaeology) and co-investigator Geoff Cubitt; Data Management Group Walvin. This project helped heritage professionals and other stakeholders understand and analyse the extensive museum activity on slavery generated by the 2007 Bicentenary of the Act Abolishing the Slave Trade, and led to innovations in museum practice and new collaborative relationships within the sector.
Research at Sussex has enabled the development of interactive virtual museums, which include the Church of Santa Chiara in the Victoria and Albert Museum`s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, and Sierra Leone digital collections both online and also recently exhibited at the British Museum. These developments apply Internet, XML, 3D visualisation and database technologies in novel ways. Impacts of the research are social and cultural, through support for social cohesion and the public`s greater awareness and understanding of their cultural heritage; impacts are also in the area of public services, by enabling 2017memory institutions` to improve their service delivery by increasing the global reach of their exhibits and the depth of their engagement with visitors.
Marcus Waithe has carried out research that has resulted in a web-based `reconstruction' of the St George's Museum, a gallery and library for artisans founded in Sheffield in 1875 by the art and social critic, John Ruskin. Impact can be demonstrated in four areas:
This research was initiated in 2003 in recognition of the neglect by museums and galleries across the UK of disability history, arts and culture. Before the research began, disabled people — comprising the UK's largest minority — were almost entirely absent from and/or misrepresented in the UK's cultural heritage institutions. Three distinct but sequential projects investigated this and, through a programme of action research:
- stimulated and supported experimentation in museum exhibition and learning practice in the UK and internationally, enabling museums and galleries to confidently engage visitors in debates surrounding disability, disability rights, hate crime and, more broadly, discrimination and societal attitudes towards physical and mental difference;
- developed new approaches to interpretation and audience engagement that have changed the ways in which general visitors and schoolchildren think about physical and mental differences and the rights and entitlements of disabled people;
- pioneered new approaches to museum practice that have informed policy and set standards for best practice not only in the UK but internationally.
Based at Birkbeck between July 2009 and June 2013 and undertaken in partnership with Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara in Bolivia, the AHRC funded research project `Weaving Communities of Practice' has made a substantial impact on cultural life by creating new systems of cataloguing and digitising collections of Andean textiles and developing a digital, online database to manage complex visual information. Two museums in the UK and 10 in Latin America (Bolivia, Chile and Peru) have directly benefited from the project both in the development of the database and in the training provided; rural communities in Bolivia have also benefited from the recognition and recovery of their traditional craft.
The `Northern Spirit` research project entailed the co-production of a new gallery about the visual culture, histories and identities of North-East England at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, the region's foremost public historical art gallery. The project generated a range of impacts across the local and national cultural, social and policy spheres:
The history of exploration is central to public understanding of the purpose and making of geographical knowledge. It is often imagined as the work of exceptional individuals in extraordinary circumstances. Popular portrayals of exploration have long been cast as heroic individual dramas, in which the explorer is the central character. Historical geography research at Royal Holloway has challenged this way of thinking. It has emphasised exploration's wider cultural, economic and social significance, showing it to be a fundamentally collective experience, and making visible the vital roles played by local people and intermediaries. It has demonstrated too how the collections of major UK scientific societies and museums are shaped by and can communicate these histories of exploration. The key impacts of the research are therefore on: (1) the cultural understanding of geography and exploration, especially through public exhibitions and their secondary reach; (2) the development of heritage collections strategy in major institutions, notably at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) (hereafter RGS-IBG).