In the second week of September, the EMKP team had the pleasure of hosting our 2025 grantees at the British Museum for an intensive week of ethnographic documentation training. This week is offered annually to the latest cohort of EMKP grantees, and is designed around essential material culture documentation skills. The project teams, which you can read more about here, joined us from fifteen different countries, as far and wide as Samoa and Tierra del Fuego. We were humbled to have had such a vast array of experience and expertise together under one roof!
The attendees of EMKP Training Week 2025 with EMKP Head Dr. Paula Granados García (right) and EMKP Project Curator Dr. Elia Quijano Quiñones (left).
Training week kicked off with a day of introductions to the EMKP team, the research foci of the 2025 cohort, and the museum. Monday morning began with EMKP Director, Lissant Bolton, leading a tour of the Wellcome Trust Gallery (Room 24) to discuss the ways material knowledge is documented and stewarded in museum collections. After a visit to the Anthropology Library, the group moved to the seminar room to share their projects with one another and learn more about the programme. We were lucky to have BM Director of Collections Xerxes Mazda join us for lunchtime to welcome our grantees. The afternoon consisted of two sessions to launch the training, ‘Ethics in Research’ by Paula Granados García and ‘Ethnographic Research Methods’ by Elia Quijano Quiñones.
EMKP Director Dr. Lissant Bolton and grantees in the Wellcome Trust Gallery, British Museum Room 24.
Day 2 focused on photography, audio, and video recording, giving grantees the chance to build on the skills involved in ethnographic fieldwork. Dr. Henrike (Kika) Neuhaus of the University of Greenwich led the day’s sessions. The afternoon was spent in a practical recording exercise designed to acclimate our grantees with recording interviews according to EMKP standards.
Paul Akintunde Akinwumi, Kolawole Adeniyi, Shreyashi Chaudhuri, and Ayan Kundu practicing collecting assets outside the museum.
Day 3 began with a morning session on metadata by EMKP Digital Curator Jacob Anthony. Metadata is one of the fundamental parts of every EMKP project—the connective tissue—so this marked a turning point in the week from general to project-specific skills. The afternoon saw grantees head over to the British Museum’s conservation studios where they applied their documentation skills to capture conservators at work.
Ana Ferraz, Katherina Theodoraki, Ruy Llera Blanes, Steven Percival, Tristram Riley-Smith, and Antonio Jaramillo Arango interviewing Conservator Katerina Theodoraki in the British Museum Inorganic Conservation Studios.
Day 4 was possibly the busiest, with more metadata training, time for editing documentation, and two workshops: one on ethnographic drawing by Rebecca Jewell, and another on photogrammetry, hosted by our colleagues at the University of London. To unwind from the productivity, the day concluded with a drinks reception for grantees to meet our colleagues in the museum. We were also glad to welcome British Museum Director Dr. Nicholas Cullinan as a special guest.
The final day had grantees make rough edits of the interviews they had recorded in conservation on Day 3, which they then presented to one another and the conservators. This gave the researchers and their subjects the opportunity to critique the outcomes and further refine their skills for fieldwork. Another highlight of the day was grantee Steven Percival’s kind donation of several Samoan artifacts to the British Museum. To celebrate all that our grantees had achieved over the week, we finished up with dinner and a toast to their upcoming projects.
Jaap Timmer presents his group’s interview before the grantee cohort and conservators.
It was altogether a wonderful week, cultivating creativity, knowledge exchange, and conviviality. We look forward to seeing the 2025 grantees’ documentation from the field and eagerly await the fruits of their completed projects. The EMKP thanks our 2025 grantees for their dedicated participation, as well as our British Museum colleagues who made the week possible. Keep an eye on the EMKP socials for updates from the cohort as they embark on their fieldwork!