"Where are the Women of Colour?"

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This PhD will help to address the challenge facing museums wanting to tell more inclusive stories from their inherited collections. These collections typically reflect past curators' collecting policies, often prioritising the accomplishments of white (mostly British) male scientists and inventors. Yet we now know from Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures book (2016) and its subsequent film (2018) how female African-American mathematicians played a crucial role in the US Cold War 'Space Race'. And the Electrifying Women International project at the University of Leeds has explored how diverse were the technical experts who facilitated the infrastructures of mid-20th century modernity. What further stories of women's technical roles can be told in our museums and galleries? You will have access to evidence of Caribbean diasporic workers in the collections of the Science and Industry Museum (Manchester), and in the Daily Herald archive at the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford), comparing them with the Bradford Industrial Museum's collections of Asian diasporic workers in textiles manufacture. A better understanding of such women's work and its systematic under-representation elsewhere, will enable museums to reconsider the relative absence of women's stories in both their collections and exhibitions. The project can thus identify relevant gaps and silences in the Science Museum Group's collections and find fresh ways to redress them using internal and external sources, 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; details available on request.