Museums & Galleries Edinburgh is committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation.
To achieve this, we have much to learn – and to unlearn – about our history, our collections, and how museums have evolved to affirm and maintain racist beliefs and power structures. This is not work that we can do by ourselves.
The ‘Disrupting the Narrative’ project marks an exciting step on our journey. We invited four Edinburgh writers of colour to learn about the city’s pivotal role in transatlantic slavery and colonialism, then to visit and respond to our Royal Mile museums through a ‘decolonising lens’.
You will find their poems ‘disrupting’ the usual interpretation in place throughout the Writers’ Museum, Museum of Childhood, and the Museum of Edinburgh. We hope they will inspire thoughts in you about what needs to change longer term in our museums to tell a fuller and more inclusive history of Edinburgh, and that you will get in touch with your ideas.
Thank you to the writers who created this work: Hannah Lavery, Jeda Pearl Lewis, Niall Moorjani and Shasta Ali
To learn about Edinburgh’s historic part in slavery and colonialism, and how the city is addressing this legacy today, visit: Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review – The City of Edinburgh Council
To get in touch with your thoughts and ideas about how Museums & Galleries can tell fuller and more inclusive histories of Edinburgh, its people and past, please contact us at: museumsandgalleries@edinburgh.gov.uk
Disrupting the Narrative