Commissioning, production, content and audience reception of bicentenary events commemorating the abolition of the slave trade in the UK, 1807-2007

The central aim of the 1807 Commemorated project was to both map and analyse the responses of museums and their audiences to the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade act of 1807.

Project

Academic field
History
Librarianship
Information & Museum Studies
Affiliation
University of York
British Museum
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Bristol Empire and Commonwealth Museum
International Slavery Museum Liverpool
Museum in Docklands
National Maritime Museum
Wilberforce House Hull.
Project link
Commissioning, production, content and audience reception of bicentenary events commemorating the abolition of the slave trade in the UK, 1807-2007
Funders
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

arts-humanities.net

Principal investigator
Dr Laurajane Smith
Principal project staff
Dr Laurajane Smith, Dr Geoffrey Cubitt
Start date
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Completion date
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Era
Modern
Place
UK & Ireland
Source material
Audio files of interviews with museum staff, policy makers, politicians, community activists and visitors to museums. Not yet archived. Archiving will be done once publication of research results is complete.
Data formats
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML)
Publications

Cubitt, Geoffrey. 2009. Bringing it Home: Making Local Meaning in 2007 Bicentenary Exhibitions. Slavery and Abolition 30(2):259-275.

Cubitt, Geoffrey, Laurajane Smith, Kalliopi Fouseki, Ross Wilson. Editors. In preparation, 2011. Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Laurajane. 2009. Deference and humility - the social values of the Country House. In L. Gibson and J.R. Pendlebury (eds) Valuing Historic Environments, Ashgate.

Smith, Laurajane. In press, 2010. The ‘Doing’ of Heritage: Heritage as performance. In Performing Heritage: Research, practice and development in museum theatre and live interpretation, edited by Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Waterton, Emma and Ross Wilson. 2009. Talking the talk: responses to the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in government documents, media responses and public forums. Discourse and Society 20(2):381-399.

Waterton, Emma, Laurajane Smith, Ross Wilson and Kalliopi Fouseki. 2010. ‘Forgetting to Heal: remembering the abolition act of 1807’, The European Journal of English Studies 14(1):23-36.

Wilson, Ross. 2008. The BBC Abolition Season and the media memory of the transatlantic slave trade, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28(3);391-403.

The following have been submitted to Museum and Society:

Cubitt, Geoffrey. Lines of Resistance: Evoking and Configuring the Theme of Resistance in Museum Displays around the Bicentenary of 1807.
Kalliopi Fouseki. Community voices, curatorial choices: community consultation for the 1807 exhibitions

Laurajane Smith. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ and other platitudes of avoidance and misrecognition: understanding museum visitors’ responses to exhibitions marking the British 1807 bicentenary.

Emma Waterton. Blame, Multiculturalism and the Trope of Moving.

Ross Wilson, Rethinking 1807: Museums, Knowledge and Expertise