Mobilising collections histories for institutional change: Egypt at the Horniman Museum

How might studies of social histories of collections have a long-term, transformative effect on museum infrastructures, practices, and stakeholders? How can this transformation be documented and evaluated? There exists a substantial body of scholarship on histories of museum collections tracing colonial agencies and networks of patronage through which assemblages have formed. This work has found new importance in the context of decolonisation agendas that have sought to transform the representation of these histories, as well as the terms of engagement and redress. However, there are few models on how to achieve institutional change; we propose to develop one such model. Our project will undertake a critical social history, characterisation, and appraisal of a museum collection (Egypt in the Horniman) in tandem with a longitudinal study of internal and external stakeholders of that collection, together with critical practice engagements, to examine how collections work can have an impact across museum activity from education teams, to social media managers through to the shop, in order to change the way that cultures are spoken about and understood institutionally. This research will involve both material and digital spaces, exploring these as social, educational, and resource-intensive spaces that both intersect and lie in tension with each other.
Nowhere is this work more necessary than in the case of Egyptian collections. Research has demonstrated how widespread throughout the UK these collections are, how they have been orphaned from modern Egyptian communities, and how they perpetuate colonial thinking. These are the most popular collections for schoolchildren to learn about, for the development of displays, and for public consumption in museum shops, online, and event programming. Yet these activities usually rely on an imagined Egypt, repeating out-dated tropes and drawing from only a small proportion of the substantial collections held by institutions.
Focusing on the Egyptian collection at the Horniman, this research aligns theory and practice across six core areas of museum practice: (i) curation, (ii) school education, (iii) documentation/knowledge and Information Management, (iv) marketing and communications, (v) commercial activity (shop, café, paid-for events/programming), and (vi) visitor services.