The University of Cambridge is launching a taxpayer-backed, bird-brained initiative to “decolonise the dodo” by investigating its Museum of Zoology collection. The Telegraph has the story.
The university is seeking a PhD student to investigate its collection of plants and animals to root out imperial connections in its Museum of Zoology.
The successful candidate will be tasked with setting out how specimens from tigers to dodos might be linked to “the European colonial story”.
Prompts for the project suggest this work could focus on racial ideas, “violent” colonial activity, and “resource exploitation”.
In an advertisement for the role, the university has stated that the project will help to present the history of botany and zoology as more diverse than famed European scientists, in order to make people “feel represented by museums”.
The project forms part of Cambridge’s efforts to address its own “legacies of enslavement and empire”, and is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which distributes taxpayer funding for research. …
The advertisement for the role with a £19,000 stipend also states that prominent objects in the museum collection reflect a “bias in the archive – centring, as they do, on prominent white naturalists”. …
A further prompt suggests a PhD researcher could investigate how “the definition of species, animals and kinds relate to ideas of race, gender and other variables of identity”.
Worth reading in full.
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