Hidden Histories of Exploration: Exhibiting Geographical Collections

This project seeks to enhance knowledge and understanding of the part played by indigenous peoples in the history of exploration, by developing and disseminating research on the subject based in the collections of a major scholarly society. It builds directly on research undertaken to date as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award supported by AHRC and supervised by the PI in collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) This project seeks to develop and transfer this knowledge into the public domain, by means of an exhibition in a prominent site of metropolitan learning as well as by an online electronic resource, and to consider the wider implications for contemporary research into similar collections of material relating to travel, exploration and discovery.

The project responds to criticisms of the standard narratives of voyages of exploration, which have until recently dominated the historiography of travel and discovery. In much of this literature, the role of the inhabitants of territory through which explorers and travellers passed is relegated to the margins. Where their contibutions to the development of geographical knowledge have been explicitly acknowledged, there has been a tendency to accord them a lower status - as 'local' assistants or informants, as guides or porters, as background characters, rather than as truly participants in the production of new knowledge. The project seeks to offer an alternative perspective grounded in scholarly research into the RGS-IBG collections.

In addition to its specific focus, the project has wider methodological and conceptual dimensions relating to research with geographical collections. The research raises questions about the extent to which certain voices and experiences have been systematically 'hidden' in the archival record of travel and exploration, and the possibility of their 'recovery' by means of new approaches to such collections.These are difficult questions which have no easy answers: the purpose of the project is to highlight not only the challenges, but also to suggest possible new ways of working with well-established collections, drawing on new approaches developed by curators and researchers in the context of related collections in Britain, Australia and the USA. These will be the subject of an international workshop on geographical collections held in parallel with the exhibition itself.

The project is designed to stimulate new ways of thinking about geographical collections which will have significant practical applications within the educational and exhibition programmes of the RGS-IBG and other bodies. On the basis of the success of the Society's recent exhibitions in the Crossing Continents series (notably those devoted to 'Bombay Africans' and 'From Kabul to Kandahar') it is envisaged that the exhibition will also highlight aspects of the Society's collections of particular interest to minority ethnic communities which have diaspora links to the areas visited by explorers in the past. This aspect of the project will be sustained through an online exhibition on the Society's website, which will be designed for a wide range of users.