All eyes on good intentions: when community refusal meets fragile solidarities

In this talk we will reflect on our project All Eyes on Her! (AEOH) and where good intentions, including forms of institutional and personal solidarity, meet procedural infrastructures, community refusal, and everyday acts of friendship. AEOH forms part of ongoing work led by Heba Abd el Gawad that establishes community stewardship in collaborative work, with the intention of sharing agency over everyday museum practice. As a project based at the Horniman but focusing on belongings from South-Western Asia and North Africa, AEOH was formally initiated in the aftermath of museum solidarity statements with the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. From the museum’s perspective it sat within the context of a broader landscape of well-intended work that sought to build forms of solidarity and allyship on many different levels with community members whose heritage and belongings formed part of the museum’s collection as a result of colonial occupations.

We contend with the limits of those good intentions and look at community refusal and small acts of everyday friendship and solidarity, as a more productive site for unlearning and change. This discussion will be based around our personal archive of WhatsApp chats. In a context dominated by formal infrastructures of professional best practice, issue-based solidarities, and project funding, we have found that is it in the informal space of instant messaging and stickers that we have been able to best get to grips with where the real work lay. It is here that the most complex tensions are exposed between wanting to do good and not harm, whilst at the same time lacking full understanding of what was unfolding. It also is where we were able to settle and work through these limits through humour, vulnerability, and small acts of kindness. At the heart of our work is a desire to expose how the sector-demand for ethical certainties, theoretical clarity, and solidarity headlines gets in the way of what matters or what lessons need learning, however well intended. We will draw on our shifting positions and affordances within this work, from long-term community activist practitioner to senior curator (Heba), and well-meaning museum practitioner to academic (Johanna).

Speaker Bios:

Heba Abd el Gawad is an Indigenous Egyptian heritage and museum activist and researcher. She is Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, facilitating Indigenous community research, care, and access to cultural belongings from North Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. She has co-developed, with UCL’s Prof. Alice Stevenson, the AHRC funded project: ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage: Views from Egypt’, aiming at amplifying the voice, visibility and validity of modern Egyptian communities in UK museums. She focuses on developing meaningful and equitable community partnerships as a means of building relevant, relatable, and responsive social and economic futures for colonially extracted and exploited cultural belongings in UK museums. Heba is committed to community-led participatory museum and research practices centred around and respectful of Indigenous ways of seeing, being and doing. She was selected as one of the most influential 21 Egyptian women in 2021 for her community work in the heritage sector.

Johanna Zetterström-Sharp joined UCL from the Horniman Museum in 2022 as Associate Professor in Heritage Studies and is also Manager/Curator of Culture Lab at UCL East. At the Horniman Museum, Johanna developed and led on a number of collaborative projects that placed community research and partnership at their core. This has included Nigeria60 with Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman, Community Action Research with JC Niala, and Ode to the Ancestors with Sherry Davis. Her practice has been committed to developing more relevant, ethical and sustainable futures for colonial-era collections, including understanding and working through institutional barriers to repatriation.Between 2016-2018 Johanna held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship based at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge, exploring UK museum collections amassed during the later years of British colonial governance on the African continent. She is currently Chair of the Museum Ethnographers Group.

Further Reading:

Abd el Gawad, H. 2024. “Strategic Narcissism. A Lived Experience of ‘Decolonising’, Inclusion of and ‘Collaborations’ with Indigenous Researchers”. In D. Ballestero and E. Petschelies (eds.) Collaborative Projects as Means to Transcend Western Epistemologies. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 148 No.2 (2023): 289-304.

Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Trinity Term 2026

Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-4)

In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close) except for Week 3, which will be in the Oxford University Natural History Museum Theatre.

Convened by Dr Ashley Coutu & Dr Brinn Hodgett.