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Welcome to the Rivers Museums. Matters of Policy podcast, this is a podcast in which we explore the museum's collections development policy,

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speaking with guests from across the globe to delve into the language used and consider what really matters in this policy.

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I am, yep. And today I'm speaking with Beth McDougal, who is the Families and communities officer in public engagement team at the Beth Rivers Museum.

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Welcome, Beth. It's great to meet you here. It's lovely to meet you.

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Could you say a little bit about the public engagement team at the museum and your function as to families and communities?

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Officer of the museum? I'm Beth and I work as the families and communities officer in the public engagement department.

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The public engagement department has had various names over the last five years.

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I've worked in the team, so we did start off education than we were learning,

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and we were learning and participation because we wrote it on our door one day.

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So it was never really formal. And then we became public engagement in the last 12, 18 months or so as a team,

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and that has been formalised now, although it's not necessarily recognised by all teams.

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Lots of people refer to us as the education department still,

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but what public engagement does is it works with all the different audiences that come into the museum spaces.

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And we work mostly with formal and informal learning.

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So formal is secondary and primary school audiences and then informal, which is the team that I work in,

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is working with families and other communities is maybe not the right word to use.

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Now is the goal of the community partnerships sort of supported across the museum, but with my support as well.

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So I work with anyone from, I guess, under threes all the way up to older adults.

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I've met people in their 100th year before, so is everybody in between?

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That's what I do. Great.

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So you have a clear overview of who's visiting the museum and would a museum is reaching out to, I would say, maybe not 100 percent clear, OK?

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Certainly. I have worked with all the different audiences that we've had coming into the museum over the five years.

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I've been in posts. I've met lots of different people over that time because we actually want to talk a bit about the notion,

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the public and how it's used within the collection development policies document because it appears nine times in the document as it is currently,

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but without a clear definition movement refers to or will it should concern?

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The mission statement does discuss the sharing of knowledge amongst the widest possible public.

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So it does reflect the idea that the museums are for everyone and the museum wants to reach out to everybody.

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But our question is basically if we would add a definition of the public to to document how should it be defined in your view?

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It's actually quite a complicated question to define the public because for me, it's a very useful and useful word.

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In both instances, public means that you haven't had to specify.

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And then so it could mean it's arbitrary, doesn't really mean anything.

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And so it means that you're not necessarily doing targeted or thoughtful work with the communities that surround you locally or globally.

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So it's problematic in that way.

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But I would also say it's complicated when you do start to think about who your audiences are, because when you start to specify by its very nature,

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you start to label people, categorise them to all of the things that were trying to move away from his museum.

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So when you think about the collections development policy alongside your audience development fan,

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then it becomes quite a tangled web of how do you think about the people that come and visit you?

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And is it useful to think of people as sectioned off? Or do you want to think about people as an intersectional group?

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And what does that mean when you start to drill down into who it is that you think you're trying to reach and bring into

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the museum spaces or reach by going out and spending time with them in the communities where that is across the world?

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I think public is a very lazy definition of who you think you're trying to reach,

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and it's certainly something when you look at research and particularly public engagement research not allowed to say,

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I would like to reach the public because that isn't useful, that doesn't create impact.

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But actually, once you think about it from the opposite point of view, which we have done quite a lot with our initial early audience of friends,

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then you get into all sorts of kind of complicated territory about how you define different people around.

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You know what they bring into the museum space. We certainly think like it's really good to keep the notion open,

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so it could include literally everybody and not city limits, the definition of the term.

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We were just wondering that if we keep it as an open notion, but then we refer to peoples within the document,

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then the way we speak about people automatically makes it, we link them to the public.

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So now within the documents, many times Bridget ethnographers are mentioned as opposed to artists or indigenous communities.

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So it seems like to automatically assume that the public is mostly British or mostly white, but like section three of the document mentions.

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Out 14 different colonial administrators who collected objects.

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But it doesn't mention any of the artists and in that sense were wondering to whom is this definition of the public gears and is there anything within

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the documents we can change to make sure that the notion of public is automatically associated with this white and inclusive notion of peoples?

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I think it sort of demonstrates how useful that collection development policy is

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when I don't really have any notion of who's in and who's included and excluded.

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But from your description of it, then I think it's that's not useful to specify for some and to exclude for others.

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So by the very kind of creation of a list, then you are making an act of you decision making in that moment, aren't you?

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So if you list a whole lot of white ethnographers or white collectors or whoever else is, then you are actually actively creating exclusion.

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Where is I totally take your point on? If you actually leave it as publics, then you're creating space for everyone.

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Although actually, are you? Because I think one of the comments you suggested was that if you don't specify,

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then do you just end up with the same possibly, man, because you actually haven't made any decisions?

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It's quite a tricky line to walk to me.

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I think I would probably expand the list sensitively and understanding actually who it is that the museum has developed links with because I think

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it's a bit disingenuous to say everyone within your understanding of publics because the museum actually cannot reach everyone at the same time.

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And so we need to think about where we do need to progress the relationships in the community building aspect of the work that we do,

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particularly when you're thinking about collections,

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you do need to have a sensible plan because actually we're not able to reach all the people on the planet at one point.

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So we do need to find out and understand who it is that we're building relationships with.

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And then over time we can bring in new groups, but actually, you just cannot reach every person in the world at the same time.

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It's a bit of a disingenuous statement to say publics without any kind of explanation or planning as to who you mean.

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That would be a very fair acknowledgement to put in there.

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Try and see which voices can be included within the documents to give a fairer overview of who has contributed to the museum collections.

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Yeah, it's just understanding in a deep way who it is that you've been excluding.

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Which groups have you made no special effort for?

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Because I think one of the kind of challenges certainly within my role within public engagement is that the local

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communities who live around Oxford aren't necessarily represented within the collections because the collections,

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from my perspective, is that they have just tumbleweed and grown depending on which anthropologists or colonial

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administrations or whoever is that the museum has connexions with at that point.

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I think there may have been, so I don't want to be unfair times when there's been specific acquisitions or understandings.

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So particularly with the kind of contemporary collecting that's been done by some of the team, I suppose I'm thinking of.

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Professor Laura Pearce and Professor Clare Harris seemed to have done contemporary collecting that is specific, but ultimately,

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in terms of acquisition, my understanding is it's whoever decides to offer up materials to the museum, and that's longstanding policy.

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And so you get whatever is offered and that is determined quite a lot by the Connexions.

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The museum has currently but also your ability to actually commission and bring in new works.

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So I think it's quite complicated that as a museum of the sort of size and I suppose in some ways, like in certain circles, probably within museums,

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that it's quite well known museum not to actually have an acquisition budget or up until recently have one,

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because actually you're only ever able to bring into the collection things that are gifted and then that doesn't give you any ability to go.

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Actually, there's a gap here. How can we demonstrate contemporary life?

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So he was slightly hamstrung by that, I guess. Yes, it will shows the complexity surrounding contemporary collecting because clearly there's

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a lot of work the museum efficiency to do like addressing these narrative gaps.

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But of course, the museum is also bound by the reality in which it's situated, having limited space and resources.

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Which also poses challenges towards making its current collections accessible in the first place.

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I wanted to ask you if you could talk a little about accessibility of collections.

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Only one hand to want to ask if you could name any barriers in relation to accessibility of the museum's collections.

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But also, could you mention some of the areas in which the bid refers is successful in making its collections accessible?

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One example life in mined is the fact that the museum is free to the public, which already lowers the threshold to visit,

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let's start with issues and then move on to successes and then we can think where to go from there.

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So one of the things that I remember often is that because I work very closely with

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local partners and one of the partnerships I'm part of is the Windrush community.

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And so I work a lot with African and African Caribbean communities living in Oxford.

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We've been working together on creating opportunities to kind of highlight Windrush communities

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and what they have brought to the UK in the museum spaces through self representation.

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And I remember my first kind of collections recce to find out what material will be in the museum that was African Caribbean.

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So I thought it's not that they had to only work with African Caribbean material,

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but I wanted to see what did connect directly to their sort of experiences,

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either for those people who lived within the Caribbean or locally to see what they could connect to.

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And it was very, very small collection,

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and it was very I think it's fair to say that it's quite underwhelming collection of things that don't really speak to

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or tell you about the culture of the community without in depth understanding of what it is that you're looking at.

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It doesn't speak to you directly like a lot of the objects in the museum.

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And I said to one of the ladies that I work really closely with who Judi James, who runs the African Caribbean Heritage Initiative.

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I'm really embarrassed about this, really, because we've got this great opportunity to work together to create self representation was

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in the Pitt Rivers Museum of the the African and African Caribbean communities in Oxford.

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But actually, we don't have this wealth of collections that I thought we'd have, and Junie very sensibly pointed to me where,

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you know, like a lot of West African objects and things, they're actually like how our heritages have moved around.

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Those cultures still exist for us. We may have been displaced people, but ultimately those things came with us.

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So we look at a lot of the West African collections. But it was just a moment where I recognised that as the collections have grown,

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it hasn't been necessarily thinking about how he might connect the collections back to people or

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create opportunities for those collections to speak to the people who are actually able to visit us.

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So it is a positive light when you're were around access to collections like it is really positive that the database is online,

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that it is globally accessible.

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But actually, when we as a public engagement department are trying to create opportunities and connexions with our local communities,

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it can be a really difficult space to be in because actually, it's like, Oh right,

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we haven't sought to collect any of the things that your communities have made.

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Like, what are we saying to those communities, basically when we haven't collected anything?

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I mean, on the kind of flip side of that, actually, you know, a lot of the material has been brought into the museum and problematic ways.

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So maybe in some ways it's not always great to have lots of somebody else's things in the museum.

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But when you're trying to kind of create opportunities for self-representation and you cannot find them, it makes me think,

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what does that say to the people that live in our communities about how much we value them as people,

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that we aren't seeing the value of representing them within the museum space?

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And when we are so quixotic and excited about like, Wow, yeah,

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we've got everything from nearly every country in the world, like there's only two places in the world.

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We haven't got something for them. And then you're like, All right, but we've got this.

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Well, what does this say about this community is not celebratory.

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A lot of the objects that we have, if any of us looked at them like, I think we'd have to be honest and say, well, what?

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We would choose to bring into the museum space to represent our communities oftentimes.

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So yeah, you want to do justice to self representation, but also feel narrative gaps within the museum?

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Yeah, yeah. And it just and that's the thing. We have lots of things from all over the world, tens of thousands of objects.

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But when it comes to your community, haven't really got anything that's of interest.

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And actually, that's a real opportunity to work with those local communities say, like what is missing?

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Where is that gap in the collection? Like, how can we commission something? Who would you commission?

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And that deficit at the moment can be moved into opportunity,

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but it's just thinking about how you work with the communities that you're trying to represent,

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as opposed to just being a bit like if you were going shopping, like choosing something for yourself, you want to think with people.

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And that's what I really like about the way that the museum has moved under

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the time that the law has been imposed is that it's so much more productive,

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it's so much more collaborative.

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And I feel like the collections department actually does a lot of this work now, but it's just not reflected in the policy documents yet.

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It's something we've noticed recently. Like the curators we talk to, they're actually doing way more than what's currently listed within the policy.

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It would be great to upgrades, including all the works have been doing over the past years because it's just not reflected yet.

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Yeah, and that's it's like it's an unfair reflection of like the hard work that goes into creating Connexions and working with global communities.

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I think one of our gaps in the way that we think about how we collect,

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potentially if we were actually creating targeted collecting through the contemporary collecting,

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what's happening now is about thinking about who the local communities are that we want to work with to like, acknowledge that.

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They exist within Oxfordshire and then bringing them into the conversation around what we collect,

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so I know that Birmingham Museums has done some amazing work with local communities saying to them

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like actually the Pakistani community is not properly representative or the Somali community,

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whichever communities that live around them, let's start having a conversation.

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Let's include other people he wants in those cultures thinking what might be a good set of things to kind of share from let's actively

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commission from the communities living in the UK so that you actually see that transfer of power and money into the local community.

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So it's just thinking differently about how things are collected.

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And I think it's so often because we think as a museum, so we've got so many things, there's no space that we can't continue to collect,

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like there's no display space that we can't change the collections we haven't got to.

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There's so many barriers, so many things that get into our heads as museum professionals about what we can't do that actually.

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Sometimes it's probably a lot more simple than we're making.

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It's probably just actually having a conversation with a group to actually explain and and talk through and think together.

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You know, it doesn't always have to result in like a massive shift or change.

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It can be a small thing, but it makes a massive difference to how the museum could be viewed or used by the people that live around us,

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as well as the global communities that represent.

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I think that also ties in with, for example, entering a restitution process, which is often seen as a loss on the side of the museum.

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But it's actually also again in terms of getting a relationship.

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And also, of course, it's a gain in terms of moral responsibility,

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but it's actually also you're starting a relationship with communities, which can be very fruitful.

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You know, even when I like talk to my family or my parents, particularly around restitution and returns, they totally understand it.

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And, you know, my family have been very thoughtful about why returns might happen.

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But then sometimes it's like, Well, if they want it, they can just come and get it. And it's like, Well, that's not what the process is about.

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It's about kind of creating these spaces for new relationships based on an equity, and it doesn't even need to be equal.

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Sometimes I think as in the communities that these things have come from, they should be in control.

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It's great that the museum gets an opportunity to be within that negotiation, but ultimately, sometimes I don't think we necessarily have that right.

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We might have sort of quote unquote ownership of that object legally right now, but actually some of those things we never had right over,

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we should never have had rights over them when we work with the Maasai communities from Tanzania and Kenya.

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We are really very lucky that that openness and that warmth and that fostering of

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collaboration co-production is there because actually they don't need to do that.

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That choice of relationship building really changes the conversation around the restitution and returns because you get to know each other as people.

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And that and that changes the stories that happen in the museum because it's not about one person's narrative anymore,

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it's about coming together and thinking what our shared communities like.

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If you think about the museum as a community space, as a community hall,

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if that's the principle we create from then we're all of the community together.

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Having these ideas and conversations, we own the museum and the community anymore.

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Maybe that's a bit too, I don't know utopian, but I think thinking about ourselves as a space community to do things like

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with by and for then changes the way that you build things like collections,

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department policies. Earlier, you were mentioning about problems to enter the database collection.

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And I was wondering, like in these new relations,

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you can literally you have two conversations with people about how we can reduce the thresholds of entering these collections,

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whether it's online or within the museum. And could you say a bit more about a database system?

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I should note that the database is what it is, and it's having a lot of work done on it.

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So I'm hoping that it's going to become like epic basically in what's able to achieve.

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But I would say as someone that is a trained museum professional who did do collections work, I find the database almost inaccessible.

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As an online tool, you actually need to know so much about how people organise collections to actually find what you're looking for,

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because some of the searches that you put in are so broad that either you get

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thousands of records or is not quite the right terminology that you might have used.

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I think that you need to have quite a sophisticated understanding of a database, even for the online one,

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never mind the kind of internal database to actually get to the objects that you're really looking for.

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And then what I find striking and this is obviously like a.

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You know, it is the way that things are being collected and it is what the people of the time,

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you know, the predominantly white communities collected these things.

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So it was of interest to note isn't what I would like to know about the collections that are held.

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So as someone who works a lot around narrative and storytelling and talking to families about the things that we look after,

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it's very frustrating to use the database because that narrative isn't there.

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And I think that's even more frustrating if you are a person that those things have belonged to or from a community, that those things belong to,

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that you actually need to work out how somebody in a museum might have written

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about the object that you know in one way and they think about in another way.

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So it almost becomes slightly obsolete. Having an online database, it's almost like window dressing.

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It's like, Oh, look like we're so accessible because we are online and not every museum does that.

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And it's like, yes, it is a step on the steps, but it's actually not.

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It's another thing that feels slightly disingenuous is saying that you have online collections when actually you need a very sophisticated knowledge,

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often to actually find what you're looking for. And when you look at databases from other collections, you get the images.

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So you're already creating another level of access through just being able to search through images as opposed to search through terms.

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You've got that additional way of recognising the things that have come from your community,

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even if they might be listed under the English terminology for your thing that you can suddenly start to go,

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Oh yes, I recognise that that's from my community.

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And then that starts to help build that picture view of the things that are contained within the museum.

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Online databases can be a wonderful thing, but I think we shouldn't pretend that's making us accessible to people because

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it's for a very small subset of people who understand how to research databases.

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Yeah, I think in one of the policies within the document, it also mentions the museum as one of the best documented collections.

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But that idea of best documented and also documented in a specific way,

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as you were mentioning or any hints at some sort of systematic extraction of objects from other communities,

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which is not necessarily something to be proud of. Yeah, and that's the complicated thing, isn't it?

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I find as a museum professional, we have in effect hoarded other people's things for who.

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And then when you look at some of the documentation, it's looked like the actual function or use for something has totally been lost because

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the person that collected it didn't think about how the community might talk about it,

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like the documentation is just not there.

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And also like, you know, when you think about collections backlogs, I mean, soon as you get into any length of backlog,

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then the actual texture and understanding and the stories that that object tells start

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to kind of fade away from it because you haven't got that first person connexion.

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And that's where contemporary collecting is so exciting.

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We have an opportunity now to think really carefully about the things that come into the museum

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and to work really closely to commission that sort of self-determine what stories are framed,

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that thing that's come into the museum collection and they have a choice in whether they want to work with the museum or have their things collected.

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So it's just a whole different way of shifting the power within how collections

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are brought into museums and thinking about that sort of sense of equity,

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as well as just having stuff in a museum.

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Do you know whether it's possible to if you know the local name of an objects or the way it's known by the community?

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If you only know that not the English translation, is it possible to find it in the database?

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So I've worked with a chap from Zimbabwe, Tebo, and we were sat at my computer and I was like, Well, that's the colonial name for that object.

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And you can see that the way that the British have done it is just like because they're being lazy about how to say the local name,

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because actually, they're thinking, Oh, well, I can't get my tongue around that, so I'll just put the name in effect.

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And so he'd be like, Well, this is actually really problematic and offensive that the way that it's recorded in the database

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compounds the colonial aspects of the collecting because there's not even the right local name for this,

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because it's been entered or written down by a white British colonial officer as opposed to a Zimbabwean speaking Shona.

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So he knows the names, but he wouldn't be able to search that because it doesn't exist.

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And because this is why you need to have a really wide range of people that you're working with within

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the museum and communities that you're working with so that you actually get these things right.

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And so that that person who speaks Shona can type in the Shona name and find it.

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One of the things with the Pitt rivers is that there is so many hundreds of peoples represented in the museum and so many hundreds of things there is.

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This is going to take a really long time to get the right names for the communities within the database,

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as much as actually then start to have the languages represented within the database.

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So yeah, you would have to ask a collections specialist. But from my working with local communities living in Oxford, we have.

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Really struggled when looking for things in the database by their local name. OK, thanks.

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I think that's why I also do projects like what you were mentioning with the

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Maasai is so important to just get that knowledge there about the collections,

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like one of the things around access is something that I think is specific to public engagement is that access for whom is

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something that we think about a lot because actually it's not access for the local communities that we work with very often.

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So it's who's able to actually access things. What does access look like?

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Is it like just seeing things on display or is that being able to be with the objects in the research base?

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Or is that being able to handle the objects or to play the objects? What is it?

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We mean when we say making collections accessible, right?

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Because I don't think seeing an image on a database makes the collection accessible.

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I don't think seeing an object on display necessarily makes things accessible,

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and it's where that decision making comes in about who it is that gets to actually be with their cultural objects, which can be incredibly important.

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And then who is it that actually then gets to handle those things? And then who is it that actually gets to use those things performative, Lee?

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What I find frustrating is that I understand the need to keep things in perpetuity.

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But actually, do we? What is that for? Like why? Why do we need to keep everything forever?

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Like with photographs, they're going to disappear. We're probably only have the digital one sometime in the future.

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That digital collection is going to stop being available to us. Things are already iterative and changing.

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So do we actually need to worry that, you know, every single object within the collections is kept at whatever way it came into the collection?

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Or actually, are we doing so much more meaningful and impactful work if we actually create space for people to play

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lacrosse with a lacrosse stick that's come into the museum or to have the ceremony with that thing,

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it's like, why do we see ourselves as the key decision makers in that?

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Because actually, shouldn't we be asking the communities they belong to and saying, actually,

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if you feel like it's the right thing to do and you've thought about it with the communities or the coaches that you are at this moment representing,

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then that's your decision is community that shouldn't be the museum's decision.

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So I'm very keen that we move to a position where things can be handled and performed and celebrated with so many objects.

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Ritual life sometimes doesn't dictated to be permanent.

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Quite often, its function is to be impermanence.

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And if we're putting it in a museum as if it were to be preserved, then we don't do justice to the ritual life.

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We're not really teaching people about different knowledge systems because we're just misrepresenting the objects.

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Yeah, exactly.

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Sometimes it's incredibly damaging that these things are still on display in museums when they should have been allowed to go back to the Earth.

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But it's also like, what harm is there in enabling somebody to use a lacrosse stick to do a pickup, for example?

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Which is what Joe, whose capture did when he came over to the museum,

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is that he had a moment where he could do that when Piers used to work with Haida communities.

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They had to touch and they had to perform with those objects because they were so

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central to their knowledge systems that it was wrong to stand in the way of that.

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Why do we, as a museum,

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make a decision to stand in the way of people actually having an opportunity to be with things that come from their communities?

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And so is not just where those objects should no longer exist, it's where there are things in the collections that actually need to be handled,

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need to be performed with, need to be used in order for them to continue to have the life that they should have done.

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If we're misrepresenting an object in this way,

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then we're not really providing access to the to the objects because we're just providing access to maybe a western interpretation of the objects.

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If I liken it to think of an example, but you know, if I, I guess, have my coffee cup here and it's like, I've got this coffee cup,

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but like I can handle it because I have the power in this relationship and I can probably drink coffee out of it.

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But if you come into my house, into my music, I'm like, I'm not going to let you handle that,

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and you're certainly not going to be allowed to drink coffee unless the power sits with me in that moment that I can make that decision.

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And actually, that's not great for you if you've come into my space, my home, into my community centre or my museum.

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For me to say, Oh no, I think I know better in this moment than you do about this thing where actually you were like, Oh,

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I thought you'd invited me in to access the things that belong to my community and I understand culturally and what you've done.

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You know, you've invited me for a cup of coffee and what you've done is, let me see you drink coffee.

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It's just like, I don't. That's the power dynamic that I just don't think should exist.

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Great examples. Are there any final things you want to maybe say about successes of the museum in terms of accessibility,

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or more like legal barriers to changing things regarding accessibility?

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I think there has been so much positive about the pit, and I hesitate to say yes.

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I've thought about some of the challenges today and we've discussed those,

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but actually the way in which we are as a team thinking about more complicated.

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Did issue for museums. It is radical and a meeting with a small because maybe we need to think about it a lot earlier as a sector and a profession,

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but actually like the fact that we're taking it on, that we are confident enough in ourselves that we're actually putting ourselves

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into spaces where people within our sector think that we're going wrong,

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that we're going to follow, that we won't cover this or whether we're going to send everything back or we're going to, you know,

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all of this hyperbole that gets used around around what we're trying to do is museum and

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we keep doing it and we keep thinking about it and we keep consulting and collaborating,

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co-producing. And in the end, I think we will be vindicated,

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and I'm really pleased to work somewhere that has the confidence to know that this is the right

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thing for us to be doing right now and for not to be listening to the naysayers and saying,

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Oh, actually, no, we tried that and it didn't work and look at the design of that that we've had, you know, happen to us because of that.

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Although the way that we talked about that, actually,

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we stand by the kind of conversations that we're creating and that makes it a really exciting, positive place to be.

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And I think, you know, collections teams are in a really like tricky place in terms of what they do because

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the whole purpose of a museum often has been to keep things for perpetuity.

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And as soon as you start to think about who has access to museum collections and what their access actually means,

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then you're changing a lot of what the core purpose of museums were in the past.

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And so it is a really daunting space to be. But actually, I think that it's very exciting what the Petrov's has achieved so far.

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And, you know, five years in, that's probably the time when a lot of museum professionals will be looking for the next thing.

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But actually, like, I'm really excited about the long term and seeing it through and seeing what we are able to achieve together.

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I think one of the things I would say is that there's a lot to learn from each

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of the departments that maybe has started to happen in terms of collaboration.

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And you know, I think there's lots that we, as public engagement teams have learnt from collections.

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And I think there's a lot that the collections teams can learn from public engagement in

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thinking about how to make collections work for people rather than people who have collections.

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People first collection second, and it's not because I want to be radical or create riot or whatever,

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but I actually think if you start with people, then you can have the conversations about how the collections are looked after.

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And actually, you probably find that a lot of people are really wanting to keep things safe or looked after,

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but it doesn't mean it has to be in the museum space. And if it is in a museum space, then we know better what people's wishes are.

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And so if you think about the museum as people first collection, second,

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that opens up a whole new way in which you think about what the purpose of a museum is.

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If you're caring for people, you're basically automatically caring for their objects.

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Yeah, that's a it's a much more sink's way of saying, Yeah, no, that's great.

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With that show, we wrap it up. That is cool. Overall, I will hopefully see you in person.

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Have a good evening. Thanks so much. That was the Rivers Museum's Matters of Policy podcast produced by Darcy Woodhouse.

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Yet boom maker man Alexis Barriere and Bhogle Sound Music by Jack Forcett voiceover Baiju

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who let a special thank you to Muranga Thomas from Oslo and the Knowledge Exchange.