[Re:]Entanglements - multi-component portfolio including website, blog articles, film, audio, exhibitions, public engagement activities, journal article, collections-based research, creative collaborations and catalogue dataset enhancement
- Submitting institution
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School of Oriental and African Studies
: A - 22A Anthropology
- Unit of assessment
- 22 - Anthropology and Development Studies : A - 22A Anthropology
- Output identifier
- 30934
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- SOAS
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- December
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- As demonstrated in this multi-component research portfolio, Paul Basu’s [Re:]Entanglements project has entailed a sustained research effort over several years, supported by multiple external grants. It has involved locating,digitizing, reassembling and analysing large bodies of primary historical sources, including documents, photographs, sound recordings, and artefact collections that are dispersed across multiple institutions, including identifying previously unknown materials. Through a range of creative methodologies, it has engaged with a diversity of ‘stakeholder communities’ in West Africa, the UK and globally to investigate the contemporary affordances of these colonial anthropological archives and collections according to communities’ differing interests, positionalities and perspectives.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- [Re:]Entanglements is an innovative research programme led by Paul Basu, investigating the contemporary ‘decolonial’ value of colonial-era anthropological archives and collections. The research has developed original multidisciplinary methodologies to ‘reassemble’, ‘recirculate’ and ‘reconfigure’ the archival legacies of a series of anthropological surveys conducted by Northcote Thomas between 1909 and 1915 in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. This ethnographic archive (the project’s core case study) comprises over 7,500 photographs, 3,000 artefacts, 750 sound recordings, ethnobotanical specimens, unpublished fieldnotes and manuscripts, dispersed across many institutions and hitherto largely inaccessible and unstudied. Theoretically, the work has mobilised Gibson’s concept of ‘affordances’ to explore the latent decolonial possibilities of such colonial collections, and how such possibilities may be made visible and actionable for differently positioned stakeholders in West Africa and globally.
The research has made an important contribution to current debates concerning African cultural property acquired by European institutions in the colonial era. Attesting to its international significance, the project was singled out for commendation in the report commissioned by President Macron on The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage (Sarr & Savoy 2018), which has had a profound impact in the museum sector globally. The film output Faces|Voices won the AHRC’s Best Research Film award.
Websites, films and exhibitions have been used as methods for knowledge production as much as media of dissemination, dissolving distinctions between research process and research output. Collaboration with partners in the Global South has been an important dimension of the project’s decolonial approach. A substantial part of Basu’s time (0.7FTE) has been devoted to the research, including extended periods of fieldwork in West Africa; instigating and participating in collaborative initiatives; archives- and collections-based research; exhibition curation; producing outputs; and otherwise directing the research.
The research has been supported by grants from the AHRC, National Lottery Heritage Fund and Leverhulme Trust.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
