SCAPVC News, Events and Activities

Njabulo Chipangura [Maynooth University]

Wednesday, May 6th 2026, 16.00-17.30. Room: OC 1.04

The Manchester Museum which is a part of the University of Manchester holds approximately 35,000 ethnographic collections mostly dispossessed from local communities and ordered and categorized according to geographical regions of Africa, the Americas, Oceania, and Asia. The African collection is the largest with over 15 000 provenanced objects and an estimate of 1500 unprovenanced objects. In this paper – I will look at what it means to relationally care for African collections from colonial context in view of collaborating with and giving access to diaspora African communities as part of decolonisation. An empirical practice of decolonisation informed by notions of relational care and the disobedient museum will be presented drawn from my own practice and positionality having been the curator of this collection between 2022 – 2025. I argue that curating with care is not only a way of work but is a theoretical perspective that challenges structural discrimination, sexism, racism, systematic injustices and colonial legacies in museums. Care is also extended in this discussion to look at what it means to care for each other’s pluriversality of epistemologies and ontologies by subverting epistemicides that are still embedded in museums. I will use examples drawn from an object handling workshop that I hosted at Manchester Museum as part of Africa Day Celebrations in May 2024. The aim of this workshop was to collaborate with communities in Greater Manchester of African heritage to gather new information about objects of African origin in the collection of Manchester Museum. Thereafter, new stories and new meanings were reimagined transcending usual anthropological discourses that traditionally treat African objects as timeless representations of cultures of the “other”. Using this workshop as a contact zone of engagement - I present curating as a space of social care that facilitated dialogue and building of active relationships with diaspora communities.

Respondent: Chao Maina [University of Warwick]

We are deeply saddened to announce that Baz Kershaw died on 31st March.

Prior to his retirement, Baz Kershaw was Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. Baz was a pioneer whose research was unfailingly innovative and forward-thinking. He led the way through his research into community theatre, the politics of performance, performance ecologies and his commitment to practice-based methodologies. He was author of The Politics of Performance (Routledge 1992), The Radical in Performance (Routledge 1999) and Theatre Ecology (Cambridge University Press 2007), editor of The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol 3 – Since 1895 and co-editor of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen 1983, 2nd ed. 1990), Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen (Palgrave 2009) and Research Methods in Theatre and Performance (Edinburgh University Press 2011). His writing was translated into Spanish, German, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic and Turkish. He co-founded the Practice-as-Research Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research and was co-initiator and founder member of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA). In 2011 he was awarded Lifetime Membership of TaPRA in recognition of outstanding contributions to theatre and performance research internationally. He received similar honours from the Irish Society of Research and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture/Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre.

Our thoughts go out to his family, friends, former colleagues, collaborators, and students.

CMPS is delighted to invite you to our annual lecture from Dr. Colin Sterling (University of Amsterdam) on Weds 19th June at 5pm in the FAB cinema, followed by a wine reception.

Entitled Ecologisation is not a metaphor: Culture in the Web of Life, the lecture draws from Dr. Sterling's research, critically examining heritage and museums through the lens of art and ecology. Abstract and bio below. Please register here https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/ccmps/research/beinghuman2024/annuallectureregistration

The lecture forms part of our PGR conference Being Human in the Media and Creative Industries, that will run throughout the day on 19th June. Details and registration page here.

We hope to see you there!

ECOLOGISATION IS NOT A METAPHOR: CULTURE IN THE WEB OF LIFE

Ecological thinking has long been entangled with different ideas about how to organise political, economic and social life. In the face of climate change and the environmental crisis, the urgency of thinking and acting ecologically has only intensified. Cultural actors and institutions have mobilised to address these concerns with new environmental programming, innovative sustainability strategies, and declarations of a climate and ecological emergency. This talk will argue that such shifts don’t just point towards alternative ways of living on and with the planet, they also instigate a fundamental reorientation of culture in the web of life. Drawing on the work of Jason Moore, this conceptualisation recognises that – like all forms of human organisation – cultural policies and practices are always co-constituted through nature. By focusing on the evolving place of museums in this web, the talk will explore how museums have contributed to the planetary crisis through specific symbolic and material practices, but also how emerging approaches in the field might, in some small way, help to ecologise society more broadly.

Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor / Senior Lecturer in Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches across heritage and memory, museum studies and artistic research. Colin's research critically examines heritage and museums through the lens of art and ecology. He is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020). He is co-editor of the journal Museums & Social Issues.