Doctoral research opportunity: Explore stories of Women of Colour

‘Where are the Women of Colour? Addressing Gaps and Silences in Science and Industry Museum Collections’

Are you interested in a doctoral research opportunity, or do you know someone who is? The Science and Industry Museum is currently?recruiting for a student to research our collections and uncover the?stories of Women of Colour?within them. This is an essential part of SMG's mission to be?Open for All. It?will help us to identify and?understand gaps and silences in our collections and explore ways to address them.

Read on to find out more of see full information?here.

How can museums of science and industry better tell the stories of women of colour, which are currently so rarely visible in their displays and exhibitions?

This PhD project will help to address the challenge being faced by?museums that want?to tell more inclusive stories from their inherited collections. These collections typically reflect past curators' collecting policies, often prioritising the accomplishments of white male scientists and inventors.

Through works such as Margot Lee Shetterly's?Hidden Figures?book (2016) and its subsequent film (2018), we now know how female African-American mathematicians played a crucial role in the US Cold War 'Space Race'. Similarly, the 'Electrifying Women International' project at the University of Leeds has explored how diverse the technical experts who facilitated the infrastructures of mid-20th century modernity were. This position will help to uncover?similar stories of women's technical roles that can be told in our museums and galleries?

The student on this project will have access to evidence of Caribbean diasporic workers in the collections of the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, and in the Daily Herald archive at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, comparing them with the Bradford Industrial Museum's collections of Asian diasporic workers in textiles manufacture.

A better understanding of women's work and its systematic under-representation will enable museums to reconsider the relative absence of such stories in both their collections and exhibitions. From this, the project can identify the relevant gaps and silences in the Science Museum Group's collections and find fresh ways to address them, using both internal and external sources and especially oral history methods, to enhance the evidential record of women of colour.

The project will be supported by an inclusivity advisory group constituted of academic staff, museum curators, industry practitioners and postgraduate students from diverse backgrounds including Sarah Qidwai (University of Regensburg) and Roseni Dearden (International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists) - further?details available on request.

This PhD studentship is available to applicants of all nationalities for full-time or part-time study from October 2022. Details of funding and other information is available?here.

?For further information, email?either of the two lead PhD supervisors:

Sarah Baines?(Science & Industry Museum, Manchester)?

Graeme Gooday?(School of Philosophy, Religion & History of Science, University of Leeds)??