The geographical museum

Research by Emma Yandle.

Start: September 2024. Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London: PIs: Professor Felix Driver and Professor David Gilbert.

Overview

The research for the project will consider the history, current and future role of the artefact collection of the Society, including the history of the Society’s museum, which occupied the main hall at the Society for 50 years but whose history has yet to be written. Intellectually, the project originates in the ‘material turn’ within the arts and humanities, which has forged such fruitful connections between geography, archaeology, art history, anthropology, global history and the history of science while also highlighting questions of museum practice.

The project will draw on object-centred research methodologies as developed in a number of fields, such as cultural geography, museum studies, history and anthropology, including collections-level mapping and item-level object biographies. These typically involve working between objects and museum archives in order to contextualise processes of object accession, management, cataloguing, storage, exhibition and circulation.

However, the project also requires critical reflection on the classification of objects as ‘artefacts’ not simply on the basis of their material qualities but also their functions in museum display. Indeed, this is crucial to understanding why some objects, such as an 1822 oil portrait of an Inuit woman or a 1950s Aboriginal bark painting, were catalogued as 'artefacts'.

Funded by the Techne DTP.