Decolonizing the Learned Society (DLS): Photos and Phantasms exhibition (1998) and geographical knowledge-making.

 

Informed by my doctoral research and recent discussions regarding decolonizing the academy, curricula, and museum collections (Array & Mirza 2018; Johnson, Joseph-Salisbury, & Kamunge, 2018), I am interested to critically and constructively investigate the role of the learned society in decolonizing disciplinary knowledge-making activities. I am especially keen to explore the extent to which anticipatory decolonizing archives and education activities from 20 years ago might give critical insights across contemporary decolonizing education discussions by focusing attention on the Royal Geographical Society / British Council’s 1998 photographic exhibition Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s photographs of the Caribbean, which I worked on as an intern between undergraduate and postgraduate study.

 

 

While this research work was interrupted by the global pandemic (2020 – 2022), I have begun publishing initial phase findings, for example through the University of Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre’s Spectrum Magazine (issue no 2, Autumn 2019).  Three scholarly papers are currently in different stages of publishing process, while plans to expand this research in the Caribbean begin in Spring 2024 with a trip to Barbados to follow some archival trails.

I presented some initial findings from this research project as an invited speaker at a round table event at the Royal Anthropological Society and Royal Geographical Society’s joint conference (September 2020).

In July 2021 gave an online paper about Harry Johnston’s Caribbean photographs at the annual conference of the Society of Caribbean Studies, and while I was awarded a Wiley Digital Fellowship at the RGS for this research, because the fellowship came with no stipend, it was necessary to decline this award.  This process has also fed into broader methodological and philosophical questions relating to accessing archives, and who is able – or not – to research and in turn write knowledges, and of the systems, scales and spaces through which knowledge is made.

In 2022 I undertook some broader archival research across global digital collections with the access facilitated through my affiliation to the University of Warwick, while working up a number of publishing outputs (currently still in progress).

In 2023, I was able to make connections with archivists, artists, curators and auction houses in following Johnston’s initial journey from which he created his Caribbean photographs, and remain on the trail of Arthur Greaves, Johnston’s long-time butler (when in Poling, Sussex) then personal assistant and photographer on his North American and Caribbean travels of 1908 – 1909. I was also fortunate to be invited to give seminar papers on my research for CLACS (School of Advanced Studies, University of London) (November 2023), the Vital Geographies seminar series, University of Cambridge (November 2023)

In 2024, I continued where 2023 left, this time being invited to give a seminar on my research as part of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies Seminar series (February 2024). The remainder of 2024 is planned as one of writing up the papers currently in process, and to give one as an invited speaker for the HGRG sponsored session co-chaired by Professor Innes M Keighren and Dr Diarmid Finnegan entitled Writing Lives, Writing the Earth, where I will be presenting the paper Decolonising the colonial biography of Sir Harry Johnston through words and pictures.

I am also very excited to have organised and be co-chairing the inaugural session on ‘Historical Geographies of the Caribbean’ alongside Professor David R Lambert at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual Conference in South Kensington, London, in August 2024.

From September 2024, I will be teaching (OU) and writing for the remainder of the year, with the goal of generating journal outputs between spring 2025 and 2026. A monograph is currently in preparation.