Finding What is Ours: Symposium

Finding What Is Ours Symposium is an exciting, ground breaking interactive intervention into the archives of Hans Sloane and will allow the project to support a reconnection to the items in the collections that are connected to African heritage communities, but have until now been hidden from view to be presented and explored with the community.

The community will sit and have critical thinking conversations and workshops with African Heritage Experts in the field of Pharmaceuticals, Medical Sciences, Digital Preservation, Archives and Culture so as to foster Knowledge building and Knowledge repair to the cultural amnesia and epistemicide that persists.

Why is this important? Sloane financed his collecting, in part through the enslavement and trafficking of African people. Sloane made use of the knowledge of enslaved people, to build Britain's Hallmark Institutions. but they the African People who the resource was extracted from are systematically silenced in his catalogues and publications.  As such this is an opportunity to Decentre from that violent act and create new progressive possibilities, ecologies and evolution in Knowledge and culture in order to Correct the Collecting methods, through awareness in Finding What is Ours .

Keynote Speaker: Dr.Etienne Joseph

1. How have collections been attained or stolen by colonialist “explorers” and “collectors” like Hans Sloane?

2. What is the cultural significance of the items in these collections to communities they come from?

3. Why were these collections the foundations of the British Museum, University College London and other British heritage and academic institutions?

4. How do archives and museums continue to perpetuate colonial mindsets and problematic language about items and the communities their collections come from?

5. How do these impact how history is written and collected about us?

   The Sloane Lab is one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ of Towards a National Collection, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

   #Action Not a Bag a Mouth

   Spaces are very limited so sign up below ASAP.

FORM

Once completed, you will be contacted with further information.