Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum (MM) is a part of the University of Manchester and has more than 25,000 ethnographic collections, mostly dispossessed from local communities, and ordered and categorized according to geographical regions of Africa, Americas, Oceania, and Asia. The African collection at MM has over 10 000 ethnographic ‘objects’. MM is currently marshalling previously marginalized indigenous knowledges to challenge colonially derived curatorial practices. Our approaches at MM have been centered around the application of relational curatorship as both a method and concept that we are using in reordering living cultures. In that respect MM has progressively transformed into a space of inclusion that facilitate conversations about meanings of objects rather than presenting them as materialities of ordered cultural knowledge through dialogue with our diaspora and descendant communities. Through emphasizing the ethics of care, inclusion, and imagination we have begun to rethink the African collection collaboratively. For us, a commitment to inclusion means greater provenance research collaborations, coproduction and foregrounding diverse perspectives so that we become relevant to these communities. Imagination underscores an engagement with big ideas, bringing people together to tell stories and to explore important questions and research. Our value of care is at the heart of acknowledging the role that colonial violence played in ordering our collections as we look at what it means to care for people, their ideas, and their relationships with these ‘objects’ which are living cultures.