Postcolonial natural history collections and museum and archive practices

This theme has evolved from a previous Ideas Lunch hosted by Brigstow early in 2024 called The Elephant in the Room: Animal Studies, Postcolonialism and Museums/Collecting.

This meeting brought together people from various disciplines and organisations working in the sphere of postcolonial natural history collections. Initial collaborative research between colleagues in Bristol Museums and the University of Bristol’s Special Collections and academics emphasised the need to better understand each other’s working practices and the challenges in bringing together academia and the cultural sector for joint research. The results of these early discussions are reported in this report. 

Through this theme, we piloted our new funding approach, which started with some small collaborative awards we called Connections-funded projects, where we funded five initial projects. Following this initial stage, two projects have been awarded larger funding under our Exploratory Research funding call. Connections teams were encouraged to develop larger proposals to extend their research, including considering any new expertise they felt was needed further to develop their ideas into a more substantive research project. This approach marks a longer engagement with projects that we launched in 2025 in order to support research teams to scale their ideas.  

The call attracted a great deal of interest from existing Connections projects as well as new teams, and we decided to fund two projects.

Imperial Pursuits: hunting records, films and photographs in the BECC archive

This builds upon the work of the Connections project: Diasporic Landscapes: Family photos and the colonial archive

Roots to reimagining Natural History: equitable futures, indigenisation and repair in postcolonial natural history and collections practice

This combines the teams from three previous Connections projects: Reimagining Curriculums: Natural History; Practising Return: Policy, power and partnership and Unearthing Stories: Plants, people, places