The South West Fed was pleased to host an online talk in July with the Migration Museum exploring their work to develop a museum grounded in co-created engagement values and co-production.
Partnerships Director, Emily Miller, set the scene with a potted history of the museum’s development over the last 10 years, which intends to fill the gap in the UK for a museum about migration. Constituted as a charity in 2013, the Migration Museum has occupied temporary spaces in London, including its current location in the heart of a shopping centre in Lewisham where they are visited by around 7000 people each month. The museum’s five principles are to be story-led, participatory, imaginative, responsive & relevant and to cut across the grain by platforming different migration stories that might not usually be told together. The museum delivers a programme of co-curated temporary exhibitions and events with collaboration at their heart including workshops, performance, comedy nights, a migrant makers market and migration walking tours. Emily also set out the Migration Museum’s exciting plans to move to a new permanent home in the City of London with further museum ‘hubs’ outside of London.
Museum Manager, Mona Jamil, shared the Migration Museum’s community co-creation engagement toolkit which is core to the museum’s work. The toolkit, which was co-produced with a ‘Peoples Panel Network’ aims to build and maintain relationships with diverse communities. It connects people from diverse backgrounds and experiences by using shared human experience as ‘hooks’ and lay the foundations for community engagement programmes and co-curated exhibitions at the museum. The museum has an Advisory Board for every exhibition they plan, pulling together ‘experts’ across different areas of knowledge and lived experience. Through co-production, they aim to share different experiences of migration that can be read against each other through their interpretation. The Migration Museum stressed the importance of budgeting for this work and compensating people involved in co-production for their time.
Find out more about the work of the Migration Museum and their exciting plans for the future on their website. Thanks to Emily and Mona for sharing the inspirational work of the Migration Museum. Thanks also to all our members (and non-members) for attending and supporting the South West Fed.
