Last week the EMKP Team had the pleasure of hosting the 2024 cohort of grantees for the 2024 EMKP Training at the British Museum. We welcomed 23 grantees, our biggest cohort so far, from 18 different countries, spanning across the world, from the Solomon Islands to Mongolia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, and Brazil.

The EMKP Training is designed to train and equip grantees with the skills and knowledge needed to carry out fieldwork. The week began with EMKP Director Lissant Bolton welcoming the new cohort of grantees into the Great Court of the British Museum. From the Great Court, we moved to the Wellcome Trust Gallery, where Lissant offered a stimulating session on the ways in which contemporary and historical material knowledge is preserved and documented through museum collections.

EMKP Grantees at the Great Court with Lissant Bolton (Director, EMKP) and Arthur Dudney (Director of Culture, Arcadia)

Throughout the week the EMKP team presented lectures that explored ethnographic field methods and consent, digital ethics and open access, metadata and data management, photography, filming, video editing, and community and public engagement. The knowledge exchange between the EMKP Team and the grantees of various backgrounds in anthropology, archaeology, architecture, photography, linguistics, visual artistry, and history encouraged an enriching space, where we all were able to learn from each other.

To celebrate the new cohort of grantees, we held a Welcome Drinks Reception on Tuesday night, where we invited colleagues in AOA and various departments in the Museum as a way to thank them for their continued support and advice throughout the year, including BM Director Dr. Nicolas Cullinan, who offered a speech to welcome our grantees.

EMKP Grantees with BM Director, Dr. Nicholas Cullinan, at the Welcome Drinks Reception.

On Wednesday, grantees were encouraged to put their knowledge to the test with a practical workshop on Photography, Film, and Audio led by Orly Orbach (EMKP) and Henrike Neuhaus (University of Greenwich). Spread in different teams the grantees filmed each other conducting mock interviews and got to experience both the side of the film-maker and the interviewee. The following day, we had the opportunity to take the filming practice to the Department of Organics Conservation at the British Museum where we had the privilege to record conservators (Alex Owen, Emily Phillips, and Eliza Doherty) at work.

EMKP Grantees Charlotte Hoskins, Wale Ogunyale, and Vijay Maitri filming the Conservators in the Organics Conservation Department.

In the afternoon, we were joined by artist Alkesh Parmar, who offered a session on the maker’s perspective. Alkesh encouraged the grantees to ‘become the maker’, by partaking in a workshop that involved turning citrus peel into vessels, adornments, canvases, and other objects, to explore tacit knowledge and understand the stages in slow craft.

EMKP Grantees at Alkesh Parmar’s workshop.

On the final day, after the sessions on community and public engagement in the morning, our grantees prepared their films to be screened. We watched the short documentaries and provided the space to discuss documentation methods, different approaches, and other reflections from the week.

All in all, it was a fantastic week, by which the knowledge exchange cultivated a space of imagination, creativity, and useful skills to see through this cohort of EMKP projects. We look forward to seeing the grantees’ documentation from the field as well as their finished digital collections!

Huge thanks to our 2024 Grantees for their attendance and hard work last week and to the EMKP Team and the British Museum colleagues who made the week possible. Do keep an eye on our social media platforms to see how our grantees get on!