Gendered Interpretations at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Vasa Museum

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This project builds upon the success of a 2-year AHRC-funded research network project, 'Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe', which raised awareness of gender in modern museological environments. The network generated a valuable dialogue between 4 university nodes (Plymouth, Lund, Leiden and Western Australia) and curators and research department at the V&A, and practice professionals at Skarhult Castle, Sweden, Museum of London, and Cultural Heritage Leiden, and previously has secured significant funding from the University of Lund and the Swedish Research Council. The follow-on funding would further enhance the existing partnership with the V&A, and allow us to work with a major new international partner, the Vasa Museum, Stockholm, which is reorganising the ways in which they think of gender in relation to their collections and museology practices. Both of the museums as well as Lund University have promised to provide match-funding for the proposed project, and see it as delivering significant wider impact in terms of knowledge exchange.As a result of workshops over the past two years in collaboration with our non-HEI partners we developed an interpretative methodology for understanding objects, exhibitions and the past through the lens of gender, power and materiality that revealed the ways in which gendered power clusters influenced decision-making in the form and function of objects. A powerful outcome of the network has been a raising of the awareness of gender (which encompasses women and men, femininities and masculinities, sexualities and identities) as an important interpretive category within the museum environment, and the role this can play in generating diverse narratives that have wider societal impact disseminated through curatorial practice, and educational and public programming in its broadest sense, as a way of stimulating changes in behaviour. We are therefore seeking to work with two international beacon institutions in order to integrate gender better into narratives of the past and present. The project the team (Daybell (PI), Norrhem (International CI), Susan Broomhall, Nadine Akkerman and Jacqueline Van Gent; at the Vasa Mirja Arnshav, Research Co-ordinator and Fred Hocker, Head of Research, and at the V&A, Joanna Norman, Head of Research, Elaine Tierney, Research Fellow, and Assistant Curators Dawn Hoskins and Zorian Clayton) would work with collaborating partners (including a network of Swedish heritage professionals led by Dr Pia Laskar, a Swedish gender historian/researcher) in order to coproduce with museum professionals gendered pathways and interpretation of the collections and permanent exhibitions at the V&A and Vasa. The project activities will have several strands: 1) To develop gendered interpretative pathways through the permanent exhibitions and collections at the V&A and Vasa by identifying and researching 10-20 objects in each museum.2) Co-production of public engagement dissemination activities and materials through a range of deliverables, including public talks, dialogue events, education packages, self-guided interpretative materials, podcasts and short film. A key aim of these activities is to reach out to new audiences defined by the partner institutions.3) Two Knowledge Exchange events in London and Stockholm with the project team and museum practice professionals (curators, cataloguers, conservators, education and outreach and public programming) at the V&A and Vasa, and other non-HEI collaborating institutions. These events have two aims: to coproduce further the gendered pathways and interpretive materials in each institution; and to facilitate knowledge exchange of the conceptual implications of gendered interpretive pathways between international institutions.4) Working with V&A, Vasa and a network of Swedish museums to produce of model of best practice to disseminate among Swedish museums and generate interntational knowledge exchange.