Out of the museum and into the community (OMIC): digitalised heritage, widening engagement and inclusive dialogue in Uganda

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This project builds on our existing work around heritage, memory, peace and reconciliation, where we argue that creative, innovative engagements with conflicted pasts can open up spaces for understanding, dialogue and shared imaginations of a peaceful future. In Uganda, a country that has endured decades of conflict and violence, a tentative peace is emerging and people are looking at ways to understand the past as a way of building a peaceful, sustainable future. We have worked with heritage practitioners who have taken 'travelling exhibitions' around the country, sharing artefacts, narratives and testimonies about the past with communities, and learning from them about objects that have been taken from their communities to be displayed in museums, and about how their meanings and uses have changed over time. Our project has worked with these practitioners to consider how we can increase the impact and engagement of this work, and they have identified the development of a digital app as the next step. The OMIC-app will allow greater accessibility to the heritage artefacts and archives, as well as offering interaction between heritage practitioners and users. In particular, this app would allow greater participation for women, people with disabilities, rural populations and young people. These groups are socially, financially and culturally excluded from traditional heritage spaces - through structural inequality, geographical distance and through everyday responsibilities and expectations. By offering access through a digital app, there will be a greater opportunity for these groups to engage with heritage, the possibility for a diversity of voices and experiences to be included and the chance for more people to participate with narratives of the past while engaging in present conversations towards peaceful futures. This work is internationally collaborative, building on existing relationships between Cambodia, the UK and Uganda. It offers substantial capacity building opportunities within the creative economy in Uganda, and through international collaboration, in ways that will build sustainable, innovative working relationships across the heritage, IT and community engagement sectors. This work is based on and will produce inclusive, diverse practices and engagements in the design and production of the OMIC-app, through its introduction into the community and with the targeted groups, and in a way that builds towards a sustainable, inclusive and peaceful future in Uganda.