The Emotional Museum: Empowerment and Agency

How do you feel when you step into a museum? It’s rarely a simple answer. 

Through ‘The Emotional Museum’, a team of University of Glasgow researchers untangle the complex and often overlooked feelings evoked by collections and the spaces that hold them. 

Moving beyond the labels and the glass cases, we ask: what do these objects really do to us? 

From joy to exhaustion and from anger to ambivalence, join us as we explore the full spectrum of feelings that museums provoke. 

What do our emotional responses to collections reveal about power, identity and belonging? And how might reckoning with these emotions help us build more honest and accountable museums? 

In this episode, Caitlin, Salma and Zaki talk through empowerment and agency.

Transcript

CAITLIN

Being together has made such a difference going to these spaces and just knowing that, because we have each other's backs and feeling like, I can speak about my history and my feelings and even if you don't exactly understand how I'm feeling, there's that support system.

ZAKI

Empowerment is like the bread and butter, but it's also tricky and you can feel empowered and you think you're empowering somebody, but actually you could be formalising a power dynamic where you keep the power to yourself.

ZANDRA

The Emotional Museum is a series of conversations exploring what we feel when we enter museum spaces. Through intimate conversations, we unpack the emotions that surface among objects, stories, and silence.

How memory, identity, and power shape our experiences of museums, and how museums shape us in return. In this episode, Caitlin, Salma, and Zaki talk through empowerment and agency.

ZAKI

Hey, hi, welcome back to another episode of the Emotional Museum. My name's Zaki and I'm here recording with...

CAITLIN

Caitlin.
 
SALMA

And Salma.

ZAKI

And today we're talking about empowerment and agency. So, we came prepared with definitions of each word. So, why don't we start off guys with empowerment?

CAITLIN

So, I just went on the Oxford English Dictionary for empowerment and I'll just go through the whole thing. State or fact of being empowered, the action or an act of empowering, the fact or action of acquiring more control over one's life or circumstances through increased civil rights, independence and self-esteem.

ZAKI

And before we move on to the agency one, do you want to just say what your own interpretation of empowerment is?

CAITLIN

Yeah, that's actually a good question, Zaki. For me, it's a sense of feeling like I have power, whatever that may be, power over my choices, power over myself, of how I feel.

ZAKI

What about you, Salma? What's your interpretation of empowerment?

SALMA

I think with empowerment, like Caitlin said, it's that power to make the choice, to feel yourself. It's not just that you can feel the power, but you can look out in the world and feel that you're able to do something. It's about you and your sense of self, but also that connection with wider society as well. And what about you, Zaki?

ZAKI

You hit the nail on the head for me, Salma, and that for me, it's a relational description. So, it's about a power dynamic between people, things, and the world - phenomena. And so, I was definitely coming from a community work background, particularly in Scotland, community education, my whole profession is described through empowerment.

So, I'd say it's about the liberatory energy in the relationship between you and at least one other person. So being a community worker trained and experienced in Scotland, I was looking back at the CLD Standards Council for Scotland, you know, part of the competencies for my profession before going into becoming an academic researcher, and there's like seven different competencies for Scotland for anyone working in community learning and development. And so number four of that is facilitate and promote community empowerment.

And so that's talking about being able to analyse and understand power dynamics and decision-making processes. It's about being inclusive and involving wider communities. A whole load of different definitions, but the one that stuck out to me in particular was campaign for change and participate in decision making structures and processes.

So, just to share another definition from community education in Scotland, so that's what I was thinking about. What about agency? So, Salma, I think you had a definition for agency.

SALMA

So there are two that I actually think are quite fundamental and important to the subject that we're talking about. So, one is action or intervention producing a particular effect. So, it's doing something that has a very specific effect or impact or output. And then another one is the ability to make decisions and act independently. And I think that one is so key in terms of thinking of what agency means to me as well.

It is tied to empowerment in the sense that you feel that you have the ability to act independently. Empowerment is the inherent feeling that you can make those decisions independently.

Agency is actually being able to make those decisions independently. But again, for me, it's quite relational because you can feel you're able to act independently. But if people don't recognize your ability or don't actually honour that ability to make decisions independently and don't credit you for your decision making, then actually it can feel quite disempowering.

And even though you've technically got the agency, if that feedback isn't there in your relationship, it just, that whole situation can just feel quite disempowering as well.

ZAKI

Caitlin, what's your interpretation, your own interpretation, of agency?

CAITLIN

Almost that independence, for me, is when I feel like that, when I feel like I have that sense of agency, it is sort of that independence feeling. And yeah, it's probably the best way I could describe it.

ZAKI

Well, straight away, like… always with a metaphor. I was thinking of, if you think of anyone, if you know anyone who's been in prison, and you know what solitary confinement is. The idea that even in the dungeon, someone has agency. When you hear about people's stories of like exercise routines or creating art in solitary confinement or reciting poetry or doing something – like, even when you're like acutely disempowered, the power within all human beings to be able to create and to have some level of hope somewhere.

That, for me, is what agency is. It can be abusive as well, but I think that that's what I think of as a metaphor that even no matter who you are, it's part of being human that you can always do something with almost nothing.

SALMA

Sometimes disempowering or taking people's agency isn't necessarily malicious or intentional. It can be quite like subconscious. And it's not even just like someone is making a decision specifically to disempower this specific person.

It's just like tradition and practice being passed on. And it's like you have to be constantly aware and constantly reflective and constantly critical. It's like you have to actually be purposeful in trying to recognise how something or some process or some thought or some approach could actually disempower someone.

ZAKI

It made me think about, so there… I had something prepared for today, but things I wasn't prepared for, which is what happens in dialogue, which is the exciting part, is that thing of when we said the subconscious, the unintended or subconscious ways that we can either empower or disempower each other. And respect or disrespect each other's agency. And it's the subtle, maybe sometimes insidious, we can think of it is, but sometimes just like you said, I love that, like sometimes unconscious.

It's not even, it's not even thought about. You're just a human doing, not a human thinking and being. That can mean, that's, I really like that, Salma. In the museum context, it makes me think of like some of the questions we've prepared for today. I was thinking really hard, like, have I ever felt in a museum space, empowerment. I've really struggled with that, really struggled with that. But agency, I can think of a million and one times in a museum space where I was conscious of my own agency. But maybe in resistance or in opposition to, or purely creative spark ideas like, oh, that's here? Wow, imagine if that was somewhere else or it was interacted with beyond being in a glass case. That, but empowerment in a museum, I really struggled with this one.

And I was fascinated to think how, for you two, this is a, this sounds like a really schmoozy segue into our questions. This is not planned. I promise, I promise it was not planned. But you know that first question, what was some moments or places that made you feel empowered. I was just genuinely intrigued. You're my colleagues and my sisters in this journey, and I'm like, where are moments or places in relation to museums that you felt empowered?

SALMA

There was a moment I walked into The Hunterian and there was like an artifact from British Guiana and actually this is such a basic thing but just seeing something from a place that I'm from actually made me feel quite recognized.

However you have to like deconstruct that now like what is a narrative behind that because that's where it starts to get quite tricky. But I have to say like just finding yourself recognized in a space, finding something from your own heritage when you're not used to seeing that at all can feel like a big step in the right direction. Of course, that's like a bit naive to say that. I have to say, you know what I mean?

Like, it's a bit naive to say that. So after that initial reaction, it's sort of like, now, okay, what are they saying? What sort of grander narratives or grander histories is this object or token part of? Like, what are they trying to tell me about the place that I'm from or the culture that I'm from as well?

So, it's so easy to get carried away and just feel excited and then like not actually pay attention to it, especially when you're just a visitor and you're just sort of running through something on your itinerary of your travel day. Just a level of cautiousness against the naivety and excitement of being recognised in a museum space.

ZAKI

I really appreciate your openness and frankness that like at base level we're human beings and like it's okay for us to say, do you know what, for all the power dynamics I was really excited to see something from British Guiana in a museum in Scotland of all places. Like that's just keeping it real, you know. And I really respect that and just thank you for sharing that. I'm wondering, what about yourself, Caitlin? Like, can you think of any moments or places? 

CAITLIN

Yeah, and do you know what, like, to bring up just what Salma said, that you sort of separating that a little bit of the agency, of feeling agency and feeling empowerment, and it really made me consider that there's moments where, for me, they're quite tied together.

I know you separated them, but for me, they are quite tied together, and I'm thinking about moments where I felt empowered, whereas sometimes tied in with agency or hearing about people's people fighting for their agency and I really think back to a specific moment during one of our visits to the National Galleries of Scotland and it was the Black History Walking Tour with Lisa Williams and it was the first time that I'd properly been in one of these spaces and we really got to learn about Black resistance and Black power, you know, people who had so much of their power taken away, of their agency resisting.

And it was in that moment of me hearing about their own agency and them fighting for, fighting for themselves that made me feel a little bit empowered. And yeah, it was just hearing about their histories and their stories and specifically bringing to light people who, I'd never heard of before, but were monumental in history.

SALMA

I'm so glad you touched on that example, actually, because I was thinking about that example as well. I think going on that tour, what we recognize is that maybe certain people in certain groups and stories aren't represented in those spaces, but just the fact that there was someone who was dedicated to taking us on that tour and actually pointing out those blank spaces and actually saying, do you see this portrait here?

Can you recognise that person in the background? This is their story as well. I think just having someone raise that conversation was quite empowering as well. Like actually someone speaking up and saying that these are missing. We see that they're missing and actually how can we rethink, or reinterpret a space that actually fills those gaps as well?

ZAKI

Definitely. I think that was really powerful to go on a journey together with Lisa Williams, leading us around Edinburgh City, like Scotland's capital, and doing that, like as you said, Salma, pointing out the gaps, but also open your eyes to what is there that you might not notice otherwise. 100%, I really, I can totally relate to that sense of feeling empowered because of the relationship with an expert like Lisa Williams, who is empowering us with knowledge about the place that some of us have lived our whole lives, some of us have lived half our lives, some of us have just established a life in Scotland.

That was a really great example of... empowerment and agency. And it also made me think like, we're in the National Portrait Gallery and pointing out the Black figures in the background. I immediately, I can't help but think, I wonder what that character in, back in time, what was their agency within that household, where they were enslaved or in servitude, as they sometimes call it, like where they say, what was their agency?

And I wonder, had they ever seen someone painting in that European portraiture style way? And did they ever create something themselves? And we may never know that, and we may never find anything, but I'm like, I can't Imagine someone working in the kitchen or working as a servant wouldn't find ways to create for themselves. There's so many examples. I think that example as well, you know, that's a lot of speculation on my part, but it makes me always wonder about the agency of particularly those Black characters in paintings who are either like painted out, but you kind of uncover them as people recover the painting, always wonder about their agency.

So yeah, thank you so much for reminding me of that, Caitlin, because I think the Black History Walking Tour of Edinburgh, sometimes I can feel really disempowered going on those tours because if it isn't focused on Black people's resistance, and it's focused on the built environment and how it disempowered so many Black people in particular, but also many people around the world. I can sometimes leave feeling quite depressed, but I didn't leave feeling depressed. I felt energised in a different way, a different emotion, but definitely agency was high.

CAITLIN

Yeah, I felt energised as well. Actually, that's a good, really good way of putting it. I felt very energised to then go off and do my own research and tell everybody else about these stories, these people that we found, well, not we found, but that whose stories were revealed to us. I think I really do agree with you with sometimes when you can go on these tours when it is focused on so much Black pain and Black suffering and not getting to hear about all of this strong resistance, it can just make you feel just so helpless and just angry.

Whereas I really felt, yeah, I get empowered, not to be, you know, cliched, but yeah, that is the best way of putting it for me personally, was I did feel empowered after we had that day of, you know, being shown all of these portraits and all of these, and throughout all these galleries and even in the display labels of not mentioning the people specifically, but having, I guess, little blanks of being like, well, it's mentioning someone, but who is that? And being able to ask ourselves these questions of who is being shown and who isn't being shown.

ZAKI

Do you think it's also about part of my sense of empowerment agency on that particular experience on this emotional museum journey was being with you, being together. Do you not think sometimes in the museum space, you can think back to having gone through an experience with a museum by yourself, or having gone in a group or just in a pair, and it can be completely the same structure you've gone to, it could be within the same month, but who you're in relationship with while experiencing the museum matters. Do you reckon that?

Yeah, I thought about that. I thought part of the agency and empowerment was that we were on that journey together, or as if I've been by myself with a mostly, I'm going to my own politics, but mostly white middle-class people, I think I would have felt very different.

SALMA

Having each other and having our community goes back to that idea of relational in terms of us feeling empowered or having our sense of agency is that sometimes it could also feel disempowering if you're feeling something but you feel like no one else is feeling it.

Anger can be quite a debilitating emotion and it could be something that can make you feel quite isolated, but actually going on that journey together, having those discussions, and then people have different bits of knowledge that they bring to the table, moments of agency and resistance that they know about and they raise that and the conversation.

So they, having that community and that connection with other people that are sharing the same perception as you, but knowing different bits of the story actually helps to enliven the story and enrich the story and actually make you feel way more connected with those moments of agency and resistance. And I also think it helped to have Lisa, who was a Black woman, a Black academic, be in that room with us because A) seeing someone of colour, seeing a Black woman be an academic and a claim the academic, a really accomplished one, telling the story made a difference.

You know what I mean? And it's like someone who shares the same background as you, telling your story makes a big difference. And if it was someone else who might be well researched, right, but they don't have the connection to that history because they're not from that place or time.

CAITLIN

That feeling of us being together, it felt, it was a very different environment to positions where I've felt, like you said, that isolating anger, just complete anger of what I'm seeing and looking around me and and bringing it up to people who didn't, who don't feel angry or who didn't understand why I was angry.

Whereas, I felt very safe while we were with Lisa, while we were with each other, to share how I was feeling. You know, that this, yeah, I do feel empowered, but you know, there is that slight anger of, you know, why, have we never heard of these people? Why are we only seeing it now?

Why is this person's picture that you're showing us, why is that not hanging up? Why is it somebody else there whose story, let's be honest, is I don't really want to hear about him, you know?

ZAKI

There's one thing I wanted to add, which was I was thinking about. So often in this emotional museum journey, I always go back to my main inspiration for things, for just being in the world, is the African liberation resistance movements of the 1950s till the 1980s, particularly from Mozambique.

Like, it's been really inspiring to me. And I was thinking about this one leader in Mozambique who's really hailed - Eduardo Mondlane. And he was like a real activist intellectual, like began totally like working, I think it was in farming or animal husbandry in southern Mozambique and then went to school for the first time at age 14 and then became an academic in the United States and then came back to Mozambique at some point was part of FRELIMO, the liberation movement. The reason I mention him is because I was listening to this podcast with BBC Witness History back from 2022.

I was listening back to it on the World Service. And his daughter, Nyeleti Mondlane, was telling the story of his own kind of agency and where that came from. And she said that his mum, so her grandmother, told him when he had the opportunity to go to the United States to become an academic, she said, go and learn the ‘witchcraft of the White man’. And that stuck with me, man. That's like an African woman from Mozambique telling us that her grandmother told her father, go into academia to learn the witchcraft of the white man.

It made me think, you know, it can be quite crude just to repeat these things. We're in 2025 right now. But I thought about how the museum, the museum in Britain in particular, can often be that imperialist museum or the monument to imperialism, that kind of thing, that could be so disempowering. But if you take it as an approach where you're learning the witchcraft of the, in Bell Hook’s words, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, rather than the white man, the white system, that can be quite empowering in itself, if you're prepared to see the museum experience as a way of learning the witchcraft of the white male capitalist.

I think that's, it just really stuck with me, that phrase, and made me think that sometimes it can be empowering and just, what can I do with this experience in this museum when I step out of it and go home, wherever home is? That's what it made me think of.

CAITLIN

So, we've talked a little bit about empowerment. Let's talk a little bit about disempowerment. So, we've got a question here which I think would be really good to discuss. So, if we can discuss some of the intentions behind purposeful disempowerment.

SALMA

Yeah, behind this question I was just thinking about in terms of the politics, I suppose, or the socio-politics behind museum curation. I feel like now there's probably an active push to recognise that that museum spaces are biased and not neutral, but when they were originally curated and when they were originally put together, that there was an ideology behind that to tell a certain story or to show people in a certain way to create otherness, the language that we use to sort of specific objects that we showcase, right? When we say, for example, maybe world cultures, right?

Or like, I'm thinking about like an exhibit in The Hunterian with the world cultures and like the sorts of items that we put on display and we say that this is part of so-and-so culture. But it's also like those particular items are quite timed. They come from a very certain space. And if we don't continue that story, then if you're going into that space and those are the objects that you're seeing for a specific people or background or culture, then you might think that culture is sort of stuck in time, right?

So it's sort of like the gaps in the story that you're telling based on the objects that you have. If you don't explicitly say that gap, then you're sort of painting people in a very specific way and then putting them in a very specific time, which then leads on to this like internalized acceptance that a culture might only be this or might just be static or might just be other.

I'm trying to think of a very specific example, but the language that we use is inherently othering in a museum space and actually that could be so disempowering when in reality everyone's just a person and we're all just really living our lives and we're all faced with the same challenges of being human and waking up every day and like needing to make choices in order to thrive and be our best in this world.

We like use terminology and labels to continue differentiating and sectionalising people into different groups and creating hierarchies based on those groups that actually that when we're being fed that constantly, that experience is inherently disempowering.

ZAKI

That was really rich. That was really, really full.

CAITLIN

Zaki, do you have any thoughts?

ZAKI

What I was thinking about is like my positionality in this research, you know? I was thinking about how I am Black British. Do you know me? I'm like born and bred in Britain. I have citizen privilege. I think about it all the time. And I was thinking about this project we've been on, and we're often focusing on the museum in Britain.

So, I come back to this question constantly, what is the museum? What is the function and purpose of the museum? And I try to go like experiential learning, because since young, my family have always gone to museums for lots of different reasons. I was thinking, like, I could talk a good game about disempowerment, how museums are designed to disempower. And then I think, hold on, hold on, hold on. I've been to a lot of museums in Britain, across particularly England, Wales and Scotland. I was thinking, I've been at a museum, you know, what is a museum?

I've been to the Ferryman's Hut at Alnmouth in northern England. It's literally a wooden shack dedicated to the ferrying culture of that specific area. That's a museum. It's one of the smallest ones in the UK. I've been to the Museum of the Highlands out towards Kingussie, which is an outdoor museum, which is almost entirely outdoors and is quite freeing and liberating to be in.

It's about like folk history, and it can be maybe seen as preservation or championing a culture from a certain area that's almost like, almost, it's problematic, but if we try and think on a basic level of indigeneity within Britain, like trying to celebrate some of the indigeneity of here, and then I think of like the British Museum or the Wellcome Collection or The Hunterian, and I think of, it's quite easy to go straight, when I'm thinking about disempowerment, go straight to the museum is a monument to imperialism, all that stuff, but I forget, the museum is a broad thing, phenomenon.

And I think I was listening carefully to what you're saying, Salma, thinking so much what you said, that is my experience and my feeling about the imperialist museum that is there to kind of celebrate the power of the imperialists. But if I think of the Ferryman's Hut at Alnmouth, I find it quite sweet. It's a really sweet little, about 5 of you, 6 you can fit in there. 
 
 SALMA
 
 Yeah, exactly. 
 
 ZAKI
 
 It's really sweet. And it's part of just celebrating one form or, I don't know, Grampian Transport Museum in Alford, Aberdeenshire. It's like almost semi-community owned, I think. And it's, if you want to geek out on transport, you will have a great time there, but you won't necessarily see them talking about the rubber. Where did the rubber come from that was used for all the tyres in the place? Or why were trains such a massive export from Scotland during the British Empire period?

You don't really see too much of that chat. And so I just, yeah, it's, I think, purposeful disempowerment. I just didn't want to get too much in my lane as activist for reparations and say, yes, the museum is fully about disempowerment. It's about what is, what's the relationship with communities around the world for that museum is where I go to. And I think some of what you have said, Salma, I think it made me think about so much about that whole thing about provenance.

And who, not just provenance, but who's running the museum, who profits from the museum, who gets different forms of capital from the museum? What is the museum's purpose in that specific context in the world, not just locally, but glocally? So sorry, that was a bit of a rant, but that's, I think it's really important, I think, for us to think about the difference of The Hunterian, who are our partners in this journey, and then some tiny little community hut, museum, which is registered as a museum, and the relationship there, they're very different things, I think.

CAITLIN

You know, when I think about it, I find it hard to take off the kind of academic hat that I wear as a researcher when I'm thinking about this. And if I'm being critical of museums, I mean, not to get me wrong, I love museums. And it's, like Zaki said, I grew up with museums. I grew up going there with my dad every weekend. Anytime it would rain, we would go to the National in Edinburgh.

I have such fond memories of them. You can have fond memories of something, but also go… be a little bit more critical about museums. And for me, like I'm very much, the museum is not neutral. The stories that they tell are purposeful. The stories that are hidden are hidden on purpose, at least. And that's what I found quite often. I think it can be, when I say like these stories are purposefully hidden, I think about… what I really mean is that it can be easy to find these stories to tell, you know, other versions of history, of other opinions, other histories of certain people, because it's not like these, when people say, it's their hidden history. I mean, it's not really hidden.

Like I know, they know, people know. So, it's not, it's not really hidden. And I guess when I kind of thought about purposeful disempowerment, it really went down to, I guess, specifically, you know, not all institutions, obviously not all museums do this. There's some that are doing brilliantly that are doing really, you know, a lot of co-production, co-curation, and working with communities. But, I'm speaking about ones who do ignore histories of marginalised communities or people, or people of colour, and that they're choosing to overlook their histories because they don't put them on the pedestal that they put other histories.

And when I was thinking about that, it then kind of made me question, you know, if that is purposeful disempowerment, how can museums encourage empowerment? How are they doing it just now? And I think about so many institutions and museums throughout Scotland and other places as well, for me, just Scotland, because that's the ones I'm kind of looking at and that we've been as a group, and we obviously went to Liverpool as well. It was really, to this, to answer, I guess, to think of that question of how can museums encourage this empowerment and agency was through, you know, reinterpreting and redisplaying objects, telling, letting other people tell their own stories.

And language really made me think about… how important language is, how the terminology can enforce stereotypes, it can make you question things, and it's so important to consider the words that we're using.

SALMA

We're just humans, right? So, it's like this idea that we need to like categorise and organise everything, but that inherent need and an obsession with labelling things and like putting things into the box, the consequence of that is othering, is in itself like saying something is different from this. And actually it's, sometimes I feel like it's quite radical because when I talk to other people about this, they just like look at me like, what are you talking about? But it just seems so simple to me that we just don't need, everything doesn't need to be like so clearly labelled and categorised because actually it's doing the thing that we're trying not to do.

ZAKI

I'm vibing with that in a different way, Salma, so much. That's why I'm grinning as you're talking because I'm like, there's a level of which this is so similar to like the challenge that faces all of us right now. It's like, how do we challenge the oppressive power systems that are out there? And also just be ourselves and be humans? Do we always want to live a life of opposition, in a binary? Or can we just be… so, I totally, philosophically and in resistance, like I get that.

At the same time, I think we're talking about museums in Britain, in Scotland. And I think that one of the challenges is I think that I've seen some museums where they'll go through a whole relabelling process. And sometimes you can look at it and go, Emperor's New Clothes. I still know exactly what you are, but you've just done a redressing or window dressing. What has changed about the fundamental relationship you have with the colonised global majority of the world that were colonised? Like what has changed in the relationship?

And at the same time, I'm with you. What would happen if you removed all labelling and people could just experience? That's the idea you sparked, Salma, in me, and was like, what would it be like to go around a museum when nothing is labelled at all? I think it'd be almost like back to the cabinet of curiosities kind of thing. Or like maybe it would do away with the knowledge capital that's tied into the museum. Maybe it would be his something. What do you think it is? What do you think it does? Interact with it. That would be fascinating to see. And maybe there are museums that exist like that.

But I do think that the purposeful theme of this question about purposeful disempowerment, I think that sometimes the danger is that particularly since, like a lot of this is coming forth because of the Black Lives Matter risings around the world in 2020, as part of what brought us into a scholarship scheme in the 1st place, some of us brought us into having this conversation with museums. Like it didn't come from nowhere. Museums didn't go, oh, we should do this right now.

Like most museums in Britain, it's because they were, because they saw there was a real threat to them. And there was a likelihood that people would be coming and raiding museums, like they pushed down monuments. So that came from a real, like a genuine sense of like, uh-oh, what are we doing and what do we face? I think, I'm saying this with an expert on this in the room, Caitlin, your whole research! So, I'm not going to pretend I have some expertise, but you are the expert on this.

CAITLIN

I am really looking at museums and galleries in Scotland and the changes that have occurred since 2020. And it's so much of what you said, conversations that I've had with people, my own research as well, is it was almost like they saw an opportunity. But there was, there was that huge call for change, but not just in Scotland, it was worldwide, it was a global movement.

But the thing that you said, Zaki, that really sort of resonated with me and something that I've been thinking about a lot was, yeah, like you said, kind of when people say or institutions will say, oh, we know we've done this, we just, we display and we know we got these community members in and worked with them and we've done this, but what did they get? What's the outcome for them as well? And it's putting into practice what they're saying that they're going to do.

SALMA

I agree with both your points in terms of like involving the community. Like I think it's so important that if you're going to represent someone that actually you include their voices in the space, but it's like the idea that you just do it on a consultation basis, which still creates hierarchy within the museum, right?

You're putting the museum staff or the museum practitioner as the top of the hierarchy as the expert, just saying that, oh, they're just there to help us out. But actually, they are experts as well. And they should carry that sort of expert, expert recognition in that space as well. Because they're bringing a lot to the table and they're actually helping to develop a different approach or a different narrative within the museum space.

Yeah, just what we're talking about is a lot about practice and process. It's not even about what is actually on display or the things that we have seen or heard. It's actually the behind-the-scenes stuff that is up for conversation, right? Because if we don't change the way we practice and do things or approach things, then really, we're not really making sustainable change.

ZAKI

And you've nicely brought us into our third consideration where we were thinking about like how do we empower marginalised voices if their stories are not recorded or not known. And I really like that, because thinking about like if you did labelling provenance work and you can't label it, you can't like, the provenance story stops - provenance being like, where does something originally come from?

If you or the item, the record is there, but the item is no longer there. No one knows in the museum. how it disappeared, which includes human remains of Africans that I know of in particular. Like, oh, it got lost along the way. Like, what? That could be my grandparent. And you're telling me, like, that's lost? Like, I want to know, like, what do we do about that? Rather, no, it's not here.

If the object's not here, we don't do anything. So, what if the story is not recorded or not known? It's a massive, it's such a challenge. But I was thinking about the last question, thinking, well, surely somewhere along the lines, it's about positioning, repositioning the museum in relation to those voices are marginalised and being, how do you open your system to understand who else might be marginalized that you did not know of, that you did not have a relationship with yet?

And that's scary for a museum because they've got their remit. They've got their, I mean, museums are under significant pressures to tell certain stories, to limit certain types of behaviours and we're lucky to be in a project, we're privileged I should say, not lucky to be in a project which is in partnership with a significant museum in Scotland who are working with us in partnership in a really true way of partnership to explore these things.

But it's important, I think, recognizing that we're recording this as part of the relationship with The Hunterian, but they're not saying we want to censor what you're doing, but the proof will be in the pudding as to where what we say, where it goes in the world, and what comes with the final edit. But I have absolute faith in the way we set up this partnership, and this project, that there's an intention and a want to not only empower marginalized voices, but to find other marginalized voices that the museum did not know were marginalized.

And you can think of that in an intersectional way, you know, it could be any kind of identities or people that’ve been oppressed. The main thing I want to say, that's a long way, the main thing I want to ask you both, you're working in this for a long time, both of you, and I think each of us have been involved before and probably way after this particular project, and beyond academia, around museums.

So what's your advice to people who, quite practically I'm asking, like before I became doing PhD, I was a community researcher, what would you have said if I came to you and said, look, there are no stories, there's no recordings of our marginalized voices, and you have some materials, evidence that materials came to your museum, but they're not here any longer, and they're not in your store anymore? What would be your advice to people of what the museum does about that?

SALMA

To answer the question, like, how do we empower marginalized voices? First, you have to recognize the gaps in your own, your own knowledge. and within your own institution. And I think not wanting to admit that we don't know something because as museum spaces, they're actually quite concerned about funding and like funding is such a big part.

So, like part of getting funding is to demonstrate your expertise and your knowledge and like actually admitting that you might not know something will actually discredit you from being applicable for funding. And so like there's this phobia about admitting where there are gaps in your knowledge and also admitting that a mistake was made.

So, it's like we always have to be perfect. We always have to know everything. But actually that is such a huge obstacle in progressing work in involving marginalized communities because we have what we have in museum spaces right now. We have the stories that we've always told. We know what's already there.

How do we do it differently if we don't know what is different, right? Like what if we don't know the different story that's out there, then how can we acknowledge it and how can we bring it into a museum space and how can we tell it in a different way?

What we need to do is acknowledge that there is that gap and then be able to go out to different communities, different groups of people who will have different stories and alternative ways of telling those stories. But it starts really about recognising and admitting and acknowledging that there is that gap and having a willingness to actually do something about it as well.

CAITLIN

Zaki, what you just said about, you know, somebody coming to you and saying, you know, there's this object isn't here anymore or this, you know, this item isn't here anymore, it's gone. And it makes me, it really made me think of, you know, what is a collection? And it also made me think about the arguments - I say arguments - for and againsts restitution, repatriation, of do you need to see an actual object to know about it, to tell its stories and tell its histories?

No, I don't think so. There's plenty of objects that we know about, we know of, that we haven't seen in person, that maybe we haven't even seen a picture of it. That doesn't mean that it's not an important cultural object or ceremonial object or to a community. There's so many different ways that you can tell stories. And I think, I guess the practical advice would be to open that up, to open up, not to sound cliched again, but to open up your minds to what, how you can tell somebody's history and how you can tell your own history and your own stories.

Just because you can't see something doesn't mean that you forget about it or there isn't another way to open up discussions around it.

ZANDRA

Thanks for listening to the Emotional Museum podcast. This episode was brought to you by the Emotional Museum with The Hunterian at University of Glasgow.