About the UK Community of Practice Knowledge Production Series
This essay is part of the Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAMy) UK Community of Practice knowledge production series. Together, memory workers, artists, and archivists share reflections, research, and creative practices that reimagine archives as living, collective spaces of resistance, healing, and liberation.
By JC Niala, Johanna Zetterström-Sharp
What happens when institutions that have traditionally done memory work on behalf of society find themselves facing a society that is itself fractured through loss?
As two people who do memory work within institutions, this collaborative journey with the LAMy community has led us to consider the conjuncture we find ourselves in. Writing in 1999, cultural theorist Stuart Hall issued a call to unsettle dominant national narratives about our shared history and culture, bringing the margins into the centre and carving space for memory work as an active part of living. What we have found ourselves contending with, 25 years later, is a deeper unsettling of expertise and legitimacy. In our roles we often inhabit the gaps within the archive; engaging with what is absent as opposed to what is obviously present. Such gaps often speak directly to loss; and what we would like to be in conversation with here is what is happening when people work to fill those gaps, but can’t agree on what it is that has been lost.
Unsettled expertise
For much of the twentieth century, museums, libraries and archives positioned themselves as legitimators of truth about where we have come from, where we find ourselves now, and where we might be going. They were places society might turn to for authority, verification and expertise. That authority has been steadily eroded, and whilst this may be liberatory, it is also volatile and unpredictable.
Decolonial critiques have rightly unsettled inherited canons, revealing the exclusions and violences embedded in our collections and narratives. Researchers have questioned who has the power to winkle histories out from incomplete archives, inserting new archival truths and possibilities into the spaces left in-between. This important work has included looking for the archival traces of the indigenous knowledge holders without whose expertise European scientists would have been lost, such as work by Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe.
However within this work is a tension. The canon is both a site of dismantling and an opportunity to centre what has been overlooked. It has political power as a legitimator of expertise, but these politics can equally be turned around to erode and unsettle trust in those expertise.
As we value liberatory archives, we are also contending with calls to unsettle histories and heritage from populist movements and the far right, within the UK and internationally. As memory workers within institutions have attempted to tell more complex histories, it is the idea of expertise itself that is challenged; rather than telling historical truths, this work is framed, and discarded, as the momentary politics of the present.
We are working through a moment where trust in expertise and the power to authorise historical truths is shifting from archival institutions, to a process unfolding in public. This makes this work even more precarious and driven by both personal and professional risk.
Society fractured around loss
Beneath these debates lies something more visceral: loss. Everyone feels it, but not in the same way, and not with the same legitimacy in the public eye. Memory work often sits in this space; in its reparatory potential to deal with loss.
For many, this loss is historical. It sits in the intentional absences within legacies of enslavement, and in the colonial dispossession of land, belongings, and ancestors. For others, it is the loss of a cultural and national identity, imagined as slipping away in an uncertain and unfamiliar present. The loss of Britain’s industrial working-class bubbles under the surface as both legitimation and denial of a shared struggle; a space to return to and close the door on.
Whilst loss is universal, its public recognition is not. And when one community’s loss is acknowledged, while another’s is delegitimised, the result is anger, defensiveness and fracture. Institutions of memory are caught in the crossfire, asked to hold space for mourning while being mistrusted as arbiters of whose loss matters most.
As we have discussed in our own conversations this is the ‘gap’: the space between what is materially present in collections and what is absent; between what communities recognise as their truth and what others dismiss as politics; between the past people want to remember and the futures they hope to secure.
The gap can be fertile—an opening for new languages, solidarities and ways of seeing. But it can also be volatile, easily weaponised as speculation, nostalgia or denial.
In 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the activism of a resurgent and global Black Lives Matter movement, many institutions responded to demands for change with bold statements about anti-racism and decolonisation. Sector leaders attended anti-racism training and engaged in policy reform with a confidence that they understood enough of the gap to resolve it. But the follow-through often fell back on existing plans or framed reform as a question of resources. What emerged was a sense of fragility: a desire to believe the work had been ‘done’, coupled with ethical impatience to ‘fix’ things once and for all. The problem is, there are no fixed solutions to necessarily roving problems.
What Stuart Hall offers
Stuart Hall’s work has become invaluable to us in navigating this unsettled terrain. His insistence on understanding cultural struggle as conjunctural—shaped by the particular political, historical and ethical dynamics of a moment—prevents us from seeking false fixes.
Hall recognised the value of working within institutions as opposed to dismantling them. He spoke of a ‘slow motion revolution’, one that holds onto the structures necessary to make change sustainable at the scale of nations. For heritage professionals, this is vital. It is through institutions that we can recuperate loss in ways that endure.
Hall also sharpened our sense that legitimacy is always cultural. People search for familiarity, recognition, a sense of home. This helps explain why nostalgia remains such a powerful force in heritage, and why radical new languages of repair and decolonisation so often meet incomprehension or resistance.
Our practice
Through our LAMy community, we have been exploring Hall’s ideas in practice—collectively reading, reflecting and testing them against our projects. Working with milk as a lens of colonial history and cultural heritage has been one case study. Milk is familiar, intimate, ordinary. Yet as we’ve shown elsewhere, it is also deeply politicised, entangled with colonial power, economic survival and ideas of belonging.
In our project Milking It!, we’ve found that milk evokes the very tensions we grapple with in heritage work: the pull of nostalgia, the contradictions of global systems, and the contested meanings of care and identity. It shows how loss can be both deeply personal and structurally produced and how institutions are asked to speak into that gap.
Mind the gap
Where does this leave us?
Perhaps heritage work today is not about resolving fractures, or offering closure. It is about learning to sit with the gap—where absence, loss and unsettled expertise converge. It is about resisting both nostalgia’s false certainty and reform’s quick fixes. And it is about cultivating the kinds of slow, collective, convivial practices that make it possible to keep negotiating the fractures of our time.
Heritage cannot repair every loss. But it can help us acknowledge that loss exists, that it matters, and that how we deal with it will shape the futures we build together.
Further Reading
Hall, Stuart. 1991 (2023). ‘Whose Heritage? Un-Settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-Imagining the Post-Nation’. In Ashley, s and Stone, D (eds). Whose Heritage? Challenging Race and Identity in Stuart Hall’s Post-Nation Britain. Open access at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003092735
Das, S., and M. Lowe. 2018. ‘Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections’. Journal of Natural Science Collections, 4–14. Open access at: http://www.natsca.org/article/2509
Johanna Zetterström-Sharp
I am Associate Professor in Heritage and Museum Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Prior to this, I was Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in South London, (2012-2022), and Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths (2019-2022). My interdisciplinary research explores colonial pasts and presents within heritage and memory work. I am particularly interested in how public moralities play out in the navigation of colonial legacies and inheritances, and in the way different futures are imagined and planned for.
Dr JC Niala
I am Head of Research, Teaching and Collections at the History of Science Museum, University of Oxford, and also a theatre maker, poet, and nature writer. My work sits at the intersection of history, heritage, and contemporary practice, where I use creative and interdisciplinary approaches to explore how we understand the past and engage with it in the present. Collaboration is central to my practice, and I often work across institutions, communities, and countries to create projects that connect scholarship with everyday experience.