With the help of this project, community involvement will be enhanced and individuals will have the ability to express their opinions and make decisions concerning how their history is told. This project offers community involvement, outreach and education. Marginalized groups, who were previously underrepresented in museums, now have a legitimate stake. Museum audiences will gain understanding and appreciation of people from other cultures.
Global Voices Local Choices Project
Bringing diverse cultures and perspectives into Northern Ireland’s local and national museums.
Decolonisation, Inclusion and Diversity
National Museums NI, in partnership with the African and Caribbean Support Organisation Northern Ireland (ACSONI) and Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC), is working on a new decolonisation project, funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund.
The partners will be working to engage marginalised communities, availing them a fair opportunity for their community representatives to assert their right to make choices relating to National Museums NI’s World Cultures collections and how they are interpreted.
The project will raise awareness and understanding of these collections, and how a decolonisation approach can be implemented in a fresh and inclusive way through creativity. Bringing diverse cultures and perspectives into Northern Ireland’s local and national museums, it will be a learning experience for all partners and participants.
About Global Voices Local Choices
Objects from the World Cultures collection at Ulster Museum will be shared and communities get the opportunity to receive a tour of the Inclusive Global Histories gallery and handle World Cultures items in the collection. Participants reflect on the collections through a series of workshops at their local museum in Carrickfergus Museum, Tower Museum, Armagh Robinson Library and No. 5 Vicar’s Hill, Fermanagh County Museum, Causeway Coast and Glen Museum Service or the Ulster Museum.
Professional creative facilitators support the groups focussing on the meaning and cultural significance at their creation and how that is interpreted and expressed today by people who value them as objects reflecting their history, identity and culture. By talking with one another and sharing knowledge, a coordinated and educated approach is created.
The reflections whether through art and crafts, music and dance poetry or creative writing will be displayed in the local museum contributing to better understanding and celebration of the richness and diversity of stories they hold.
Project Workshops
Project Outcomes
The partners are dedicated to promoting diversity, inclusiveness, and accessibility and making sure "no one is left behind. The project proactively confronts the difficulties associated with depiction of histories of marginalised groups so museums will be more certain and knowledgeable about the collection of world cultures.
The initiative will significantly progress efforts to educate the various communities in Northern Ireland about some of the local cultures and contribute to the eradication of all types of racism that are widespread in the UK.
Objects from the World Cultures collection will be shared, better understood and celebrated for the richness and diversity of stories they hold. Rather than a narrow and traditional focus on their imperial histories, the focus will be on the meaning and cultural significance invested in them at their creation, and how that is interpreted and expressed by people today through their creative responses. The project will therefore also help further understanding about the significance these collections continue to have in contemporary society, to people who value them as objects reflecting their history, identity and culture.
