[ONLINE] Anti-Colonial Annotations of Sloane Jamaican references: Inquires into African Slavery

This project draws on the guide to the Sloane Database produced by the Natural History Museum before the Sloane Lab project as the key unit of analysis. It seeks to reinstate the experience of enslaved people and the history of slavery as the prism through which to explore and understand this data by examining the historicities, technologies and methodologies through the lens of Sloane's involvement in the local history of Jamaica and African enslavement. This project was prompted by the absence of this context in the publicly accessible data provided by the Natural History Museum about the Sloane Database prior to the Sloane Lab.  

The project inquiries into the ways that digitally mediated annotations can support the articulation and inscription of previously ignored/ marginalized anti-colonial readings of historical and curatorial-mediated archives. Historical hermeneutical methodological lens was employed to guide the critical perspectives and analysis.  

The output of the research includes: educational tutorial, online workshops and publication upon receiving funding. The educational tutorial hosted on the Wiki platform can be collaboratively edited and re-useable as an Open Educational Resource for academic researchers, archivists, museum curators as well as a platform for educational settings, courses on history, slavery, (anti) colonialism and decolonization. 

Register for the Zoom event and view the full seminar series programme: https://critical-creative.eventbrite.co.uk

The Sloane Lab Seminar Series is convened by Marco Humbel (Sloane Lab & UCLDH), Nadezhda Povroznik (TU Darmstadt), Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL) and Andrew Flinn (UCL). Administrative support is provided by Lucy Stagg (UCLDH & UCL IAS).

This joint virtual seminar is co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.