‘Where are the Women of Colour? Addressing Gaps and Silences in Science and Industry Museum Collections’
Full information on this studentship, including application procedures, is available here
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How can museums of science and industry better tell the stories of women of colour, currently so rarely visible in their exhibitions?
This PhD project will help to address the challenge facing museums wanting to tell more inclusive stories from their inherited collections. These collections typically reflect past curators’ collecting policies, often prioritising the accomplishments of white male scientists and inventors. Yet we now know from Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures book (2016) and its subsequent film (2018) how female African-American mathematicians played a crucial role in the US Cold War ‘Space Race’. And the Electrifying Women International project at the University of Leeds has explored how diverse were the technical experts who facilitated the infrastructures of mid-20th century modernity. What further similar stories of women’s technical roles can be told in our museums and galleries?
The student on this project will have access to evidence of Caribbean diasporic workers in the collections of the Science and Industry Museum (Manchester), and in the Daily Herald archive at the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford), comparing them with the Bradford Industrial Museum’s collections of Asian diasporic workers in textiles manufacture.
A better understanding of such women’s work and its systematic under-representation elsewhere, will enable museums to reconsider the relative absence of women’s stories in both their collections and exhibitions. From this, the project can identify the relevant gaps and silences in the Science Museum Group’s collections and find fresh ways to redress them using both internal and external sources and especially oral history methods, to enhance the evidential record of women of colour.
The project will be supported by an inclusivity advisory group constituted of academic staff, museum curators, industry practitioners and postgraduate students from diverse backgrounds including Sarah Qidwai (University of Regensburg) and Roseni Dearden (International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists) – further details available on request.
This PhD studentship is available to applicants of all nationalities for full-time or part-time study from October 2022. Details of funding and other information is available here
For further information contact either of the two lead PhD supervisors:
Sarah Baines (Science & Industry Museum, Manchester) Sarah.Baines@scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk
Graeme Gooday (School of Philosophy, Religion & History of Science, University of Leeds) g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk
Museum Development North West 