Black Beyond Data: Working with Descendant Communities
Museum X is partnering on a new project with Black Beyond Data and Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG), exploring care centred approaches to interpret collections that relate to colonialism, historical violences and slavery.
About the project
Museum X is working in partnership with Black Beyond Data and Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) on Black Beyond Data: Working with Descendant Communities, a research and practice project exploring how collections connected to enslavement, colonialism and their continuing legacies might be researched, interpreted and cared for differently.
The project centres on the Michael Graham-Stewart Collection, acquired by Royal Museums Greenwich in 2002. The collection brings together hundreds of objects and archival records relating to the histories and legacies of the trafficking and enslavement of African people, abolition, colonialism and the African diaspora.
As access to these collections expands digitally, important questions remain about who interprets them, whose knowledge is recognised, how difficult and racialised material is encountered, and what responsibilities museums hold when descendant communities contribute new knowledge.
Rather than inviting communities simply to respond to interpretations already produced by the museum, this project has worked with seven paid descendant-community co-researchers, supporting them to develop their own questions, select material for further enquiry and explore the collection through archival research, discussion, creative practice, sound, walking, journalling and reflection.
Museum X methodology
Museum X has led the design and delivery of the descendant-community research programme through a Pan-African, decolonial and relational approach to museum practice.
Our methodology brings together archival research with embodied, creative and reflective forms of enquiry. It is concerned not only with what museums say about collections, but with the conditions in which knowledge is produced: who has access, who is paid, who is able to ask questions, whose knowledge is recognised, how consent operates, where research lives, and what responsibility follows when communities contribute new understanding.
Care has been integral to the work, but not as an assumption that difficult histories affect everyone in the same way. The programme has instead created space for informed choice, emotional bandwidth, reflection, the right to pause or step away, and different ways of participating.
Through the project, descendant-community researchers have been resourced to develop independent lines of enquiry and to challenge questions of naming, provenance, ownership, cultural knowledge, collecting histories and institutional responsibility.
The project is not seeking to produce a single formula for ethical practice. It is testing what changes when descendant communities move from being consulted about collections to becoming researchers with authority to shape the questions themselves.
Sandra Shakespeare – Project Lead
Sandra Shakespeare, Founder and Executive Director of Museum X, leads the Working with Descendant Communities programme for Museum X.
Sandra developed the overall research and facilitation approach, working with Black Beyond Data, Royal Museums Greenwich, the Museum X facilitation team and descendant-community co-researchers to shape the project from its early design through to delivery and evaluation.
Her role has included developing the project methodology; leading collection research and object selection; negotiating participant agreements, consent, cultural rights and data-governance arrangements; coordinating access across RMG collections and archives; supporting the facilitation and care framework; and leading the development of the project’s emerging Learning Towards an Ethical Framework report.
Sandra’s work through Museum X is particularly concerned with how Black-led and descendant-led research can move beyond consultation towards greater authority over the questions, methods and forms through which collections are understood.
The project has also opened wider questions about what happens after a community research programme ends: how contributed knowledge is stewarded, how institutions respond to new interpretations, and what long-term responsibilities arise for museums, research partners and digital platforms.
Learning Towards an Ethical Framework
Learning from the programme is being brought together in Black Beyond Data: Working with Descendant Communities – Learning Towards an Ethical Framework.
The report is grounded in the experiences and research of the seven co-researchers, Museum X practitioners, Black Beyond Data and colleagues across Royal Museums Greenwich.
Structured through Call / Response / Return, it explores questions including:
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descendant authority and shared research practice;
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access to archives and collections;
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care, duty and institutional responsibility;
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consent, cultural rights and data stewardship;
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provenance and acquisition;
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image access and digital infrastructure;
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practitioner labour and resourcing;
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and what accountability should look like after a funded project ends.
It is intentionally described as learning towards an ethical framework. This is a pilot and research test phase rather than a completed code of practice. Some changes have already been put into practice, others remain in development, and several questions require further research.
Useful links
Michael Graham-Stewart collection at the Royal Museums Greenwich website
Upcoming events
What changes when descendant communities move from participating in museum interpretation to helping shape the practice itself?
Join us on 20th November as we bring together descendant co-researchers, artists, researchers and museum practitioners to share what we have learned, where the work has challenged us, and what more ethical and collaborative museum practice might require.
Image taken from online Michael Graham-Stewart collection
...exploring Black culture and intangible heritage in Britain holds a quiet kind of power. People don’t recognise that they are in possession of such powerful stories.