participatory research Archives

Playing the Archive

Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground reflects on a major study inspired by the work of citizen scholar folklorists Iona and Peter Opie. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Opies built a vast collection of children’s street and playground games, stories, sayings, rhymes, beliefs and habits as told to them by children all over Britain. These accounts are now held in the Bodleian Libraries and were the focus and inspiration for the new study. New stories and games were gathered from today’s children, and comparisons drawn between play experiences at these two different points in time.

The book explores how the Opie Archive was made publicly available online by the project through digital images, innovative cataloguing and playful digital media interfaces, such as a red telephone kiosk at the Young V&A. Chapters analyse the ethnographic strands of the project, collecting evidence of new and old forms of play on today’s playgrounds using state-of-the-art digital methods. The book proposes new ways of thinking about changes and adaptations to play and games, theorising on the workings of interfaces, repertoires and archives. It also considers the Opies’ ways of working, landscapes of play over time, and intergenerational dialogue about play. The collection presents research evidence and theory which speak back to the often reductive public discourse around children’s play and digital media. It positions children as creative, agentive and engaged participants in their play cultures.

The Glades of Embobut

The Embobut Forest, western Kenya, is beset by a series of pernicious challenges. Degraded forest ecosystems, biodiversity loss, violent evictions, population growth and the adverse impacts of climate change all underwrite a persistent sense of regional crisis and failed prosperity. Conservationists blame local populations for forest destruction, while community activists emphasise experiences of livelihood loss and marginalisation produced through the imposition of unjust conservation boundaries. Proposed solutions are equally contested. Calls to restore the forest to an imagined natural state devoid of human presence sit in tension with activist efforts to revive idealised Indigenous lifeways grounded in environmental stewardship.

The Glades of Embobut challenges these narratives by situating Embobut as a landscape in constant transformation, shaped through ongoing efforts by communities and policy makers to rework ecological, economic and political relationships in pursuit of regional prosperity. It demonstrates how existing forms of socioecological wellbeing emerge primarily from local knowledge and everyday practice rather than externally conceived development models, and how these processes unfold without fixed end points. Any imagining of forest futures must therefore accommodate the open-ended nature of daily life, where new social and ecological relationships emerge in ways that diverge from the idealised forest environments envisioned by both conservationist and activist thinking.

Deconstituting Museums

Over the past 30 years, museums have turned to participation in the hope that direct involvement of non-museum staff would serve their claims to be accessible, inclusive, representative and diverse. And yet, adding participation to museums has often generated conflict, disappointment and anger.

Deconstituting Museums argues that the difficulties produced by adding participatory practice arise from political incompatibility. In the representational liberal logics that underpin museum decision-making, trustees and professionals make decisions ‘on behalf of’ future generations and the public. This is a political infrastructure the book names ‘museum constitution’. Conversely, participation arises from ideas and practices from direct and horizontal political traditions, drawing those who act as facilitators into new relationships and expanding political imaginations.

Through sustained engagement with theories of affect, materialism, and feminist and decolonial praxis, Helen Graham identifies techniques for deconstituting museums. She uses experimental writing as a method to turn away from the desire to right institutional wrongs and towards relational and directly negotiated ways of organising. In doing so she locates participation not as engagement but as a mode of governance that is enabled by, and enables, variant political ontologies. This is an alternative named ‘participatory worlding’. The affective work of facilitating participation has long tugged at and frayed museums’ constitutional liberal logics. Deconstituting Museums envisages how participation and its affects might be activated in reworking the politics of heritage.