The Museum of Discomfort: How Glasgow’s Hunterian is Decolonising through its Collection
Release Date: 05/08/2024
Understanding Racism, Transforming University Cultures - Les Back and Professor Patricia Hill Collins in Conversation
Recovering Community
Welcome back to Recovering Community. In a special bonus episode, Les Back meet world-renowned sociologist Professor Patricia Hill Collins, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of Maryland College Park, and the Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emerita of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Professor Collins visited Glasgow on 14 October, 2024, to give the University's inaugural Racial Justice Lecture. This was the first event in a new series of public lectures which has been established through the University’s Understanding Racism,...
info_outline
Roots and Futures in Sheffield: Growing Heritage Around Communities
Recovering Community
For this special bonus edition of Recovering Community, Les Back travels south of the border, to Sheffield to look at how rethinking the relationship between heritage and local communities can make them more inclusive, particularly for the most marginalised. Here, the Roots and Futures project is listening to the perspectives of under-served communities, particularly Sheffield's Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities in seven locations across the city. The project is informing city-level heritage strategies in partnership with Joined Up Heritage Sheffield,...
info_outline
We See You: Exploring the links between violence, homelessness and the drug economy in Scotland
Recovering Community
Les Back meets with Dr Susan Batchelor, Dr Caitlin Gormley and Jim Thomson to learn more about a new piece of research exploring repeat violence in Scotland. To be homeless is more than not having a roof over your head. It is also about a denial of being, a person out of place to look away from, to ignore and not make eye contact with them as you pass busily through Glasgow's Central Station. The numbers of people living precariously in the city is increasing (a recent article in the Glasgow Herald says they have doubled recently). This is a story of a deep crisis not only in...
info_outline
The Museum of Discomfort: How Glasgow’s Hunterian is Decolonising through its Collection
Recovering Community
Les Back visits the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow to talk about history, and how it impacts our lives and relationships in the 21st century. He meets with Hunterian Curator of Discomfort Zandra Yeaman and Dr Jay Sarkar to learn more about why history is so important when it comes to meaningful and respectful connection and cohabitation. Glasgow is famous for its museums and galleries - from The Burrell Collection in the Southside, to Kelvingrove in the West End. But as you wander around these grand, serene places, do you ever think about how these traces of the past got...
info_outline
The Soup'erheroes: Fostering Food Solidarity in Castlemilk
Recovering Community
Les Back swaps his desk for the kitchen table as he travels to Castlemilk in the south of Glasgow to meet a group of remarkable women working together to feed their community. Is there a more powerful symbol of community than the soup pot? It is both a distinctive part of Scottish working-class experience and at the same time a universal ritual of solidarity in hard times. Eating a home cooked meal is a kind of communion with others. But what happens to a family, or even a whole society, when the basic necessity of food is out of reach? The huge demand on food banks in recent years...
info_outline
Is Wasteland Ever Wasted? Looking beyond the developer’s view; how brownfield sites add value to the cityscape
Recovering Community
In this episode of Recovering Community, Les Back climbs through a hole in a fence to get right to the foundations of urban life. He meets with Dr Ross Beveridge, and artists Mary Redmond and Jim Colquhoun to talk about the landscape of the city, how it’s valued, and who gets to value it. The story of Glasgow’s mixed fortunes is written into its built environment - from the confident grandeur of its Victorian monuments, to the once futuristic, now flaking edifices of post war modernism, to the new smoked glass and steel developments promising growth, longevity and perhaps - with some...
info_outline
The Wellbeing Economy: rethinking traditional economic structures to benefit people and planet
Recovering Community
What does it take to reconfigure our traditional capitalist economic structures so that people, communities and the environment come before profit? That’s the question at the heart of the wellbeing economy movement and the subject of today’s episode. Gerard McCartney practiced as a GP and trained as an economist before his current role as Professor of Wellbeing Economy at the University of Glasgow. Gerry’s work explores the connections between health outcomes, community, and our working and living environments. Gerry and Anne talk to Dr Katherine Trebeck, a political economist and...
info_outline
Coming Back: How Vox Liminis uses creative responses to the criminal justice system to build community
Recovering Community
How do you build community after the criminal justice system has removed you from society to serve a prison sentence? Today’s episode of Recovering Community explores the work of Vox Liminis, a unique organisation, set up to find creative answers to questions about crime, punishment, reintegration, and community. Vox is for people who have all kinds of experiences of criminal justice; from children with parents in prison, to academic researchers and social workers. It hosts a number of projects from its base in Glasgow’s Gallowgate, and in prisons across Scotland. Anne Kerr...
info_outline
Colombia River Stories: The symbiotic relationship between the Río Atrato and the community who call it home
Recovering Community
The 400 mile long Río Atrato is in the Chocó department of northwest Colombia. Chocó is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the country. It’s also one of the poorest, and the river provides essential transport and economic opportunities to the residents.
info_outline
Communities, Identity and Borders: What does the Kenmure Street Protest tell us about belonging to Glasgow?
Recovering Community
This episode of Recovering Community begins with the Kenmure Street Protest, when community resistance to a Home Office raid resulted in the release of two men back into their neighbourhood.
info_outlineLes Back visits the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow to talk about history, and how it impacts our lives and relationships in the 21st century. He meets with Hunterian Curator of Discomfort Zandra Yeaman and Dr Jay Sarkar to learn more about why history is so important when it comes to meaningful and respectful connection and cohabitation.
Glasgow is famous for its museums and galleries - from The Burrell Collection in the Southside, to Kelvingrove in the West End. But as you wander around these grand, serene places, do you ever think about how these traces of the past got here and what museums are actually for?
Perhaps they’re to inspire, to educate, to memorialise our shared history. Or maybe to help us relax on a Sunday or enjoy a nice coffee and piece of cake, but could there, or should there be the possibility that museums can make us uncomfortable?
It’s a question that’s in the minds of the curators and community at The Hunterian - the museum right at the heart of the University of Glasgow’s main building. The Hunterian is home to a beautiful and important collection of art and objects, bequeathed to the University in 1783 by the pioneering obstetrician Dr William Hunter, who was a former student.
A collection tells a story about the collector; it also tells us a lot about the society, politics and trends of the time it was formed. But when we think carefully about how the collection was put together, it also tells us a lot about power, wealth and privilege - and that’s where the stories can start to get uncomfortable.
Discomfort is closely related to confronting the legacy of empire in our culture. The museum exhibits often provide symbols or clues about the unspoken or glossed damage and violence within the historical record. Reckoning with that imperial past involves ‘decolonisation’ an idea that’s in the minds of many people who think about history - from teachers and activists, to artists, curators and writers.
Learn more about the Curating Discomfort here
https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/about/achangingmuseum/curatingdiscomfort/
And you can learn more about Decolonisation Through Archives, including the podcast here
https://www.decolonisationthrougharchives.scot/
Recovering Community is presented by Les Back and produced by Freya Hellier