Category Archives for Decolonising collections

The Past, Present and Future of the NatSCA Conference

By Eimear Ashe, Collections Moves Project Manager, National Museum of Ireland, Dublin.

Ulster Museum lecture theatre

NatSCA as a named subject specialist network and membership organisation, held its first conference in 2004 at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. This year, the conference took place in Northern Ireland for the first time — hosted by the Ulster Museum in the heart of Belfast. NatSCA has always sited its conference in the UK and Ireland. In the map below, green flags represent a museum that has hosted the conference once, and yellow stars represent sites that have hosted twice (Leeds and Dublin):

Where has NatSCA held its annual conferences?

This year’s programme was notably wide‑ranging, attracting a diverse mix of attendees from across the sector. Given my current role as Project Manager for the redevelopment of the Natural History Museum at the National Museum of Ireland, several talks particularly resonated with me. I was especially interested in the presentation by Lydia Amies and Emanuele Casafredda, which focused on stabilising and relocating fossil mammal collections. Collection moves and storage planning have been a recurring theme throughout my career, so it was really worthwhile seeing how colleagues elsewhere are tackling similar logistical and conservation challenges.

Continue reading →

Collaborating with External Partners to address Colonial Legacies and Challenge the Secondary School Curriculum in Liverpool.

Written by Olivia Beavers, National Museums Liverpool, World Museum & Sonal Mistry, Freelance Scientific Illustrator.

Just over a year ago, Sonal approached me with a request to access the vertebrate zoology collection for her Master’s thesis, which explored scientific illustration through natural science specimens. Collaborating with Sonal has helped the vertebrate zoology department to address colonial legacies and provide more context to the collections through thoughtful scientific illustration.

Olivia – World Museum

World Museum’s vertebrate zoology collection has a historic relationship between artists and specimens. Edward Lear and John Gould were just two of many illustrators who sketched and painted specimens within the 13th Earl of Derby’s zoology collection.

With so many specimens stored behind the scenes and many untold stories of collectors and colonial legacies to be explored, curators are often considering new ways to get this information across to the public. Sonal contacted the museum as a Masters illustration student asking to collaborate with the vertebrate zoology department for her thesis. I supervised Sonal’s Master’s illustration thesis project, where she produced scientific illustrations to help improve the interpretation of vertebrate zoology specimens on display. After an initial walk around the gallery with Sonal, I handed out some questionnaires to gain a sense of the public’s opinions of the information that was already available. Sonal and I went through the different illustration styles and worked through which styles would be best suited to our audience for each topic. One of the recurring points that we noticed from the questionnaires was a plea for more information for older visitors and more colour.

Continue reading →

Unpacking the Entanglements in Liverpool’s Lost Drawer of White-eyes.

By John-James Wilson, Lead Curator of Zoology, World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

It started with the discovery of a letter tucked away in the collection history files. In 1948, the curator of the Raffles Museum in Singapore was trying to track down the type specimen of Zosterops difficilis (a subspecies of Mountain White-eye) and had written to the director at Liverpool Museum (now World Museum) to ask if the specimen was there. What began as a simple curiosity-led search for a single specimen quickly snowballed. This 77-year-old enquiry had suddenly launched me into a deep dive into entangled stories of colonial history, war time losses and bird taxonomy.

I found myself re-examining the records of 250 White-eye specimens from the Liverpool collection, many with outdated or ambiguous taxonomic names, obscure references in scientific literature, and possible name-bearing-status. My recent article – Ghosts and entanglements in one drawer of a natural history collection – explains how I cross-referenced historical documents, species descriptions, and records of specimens in other collections around the world to establish modern names and types status for these specimens.

Continue reading →

Liverpool, Natural History and Extinction: The Case of a Real Liver Bird

Written by John-James Wilson (Lead Curator of Zoology, World Museum), Jude Piesse (Senior Lecturer in English Literature, LJMU) & Alyssa Grossman (Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Liverpool).

The interdisciplinary public engagement project ‘ENLivEN: Empire, Nature and Liverpool: Investigating and Engaging with Natural History’, is a collaboration between University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and 14 city-wide partners. In this blog we bring together reflections from a workshop held at World Museum, Liverpool in October 2025, where we trialled approaches for the project with LJMU undergraduates. ENLivEN will develop further workshops on similarly evocative ‘catalyst’ specimens and objects held across participating institutions.

John-James Wilson (Lead Curator of Zoology, World Museum)

Spotted Green Pigeons are a species that became extinct at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In 1793, Dr John Latham noticed two unusual taxidermized pigeons in private natural history collections in London. He described them as a new species that he called Spotted Green Pigeons. One of the specimens is now lost but the other was bought by the 13th Earl of Derby. In 1851, the 13th Earl of Derby left his specimen to the people of Liverpool in his will. Because the specimen is kept at World Museum, this specimen became known as the Liverpool Pigeon.

The Liverpool Pigeon is now the only known Spotted Green Pigeon specimen in existence. Uncertainty about the status and nearest relatives of Spotted Green Pigeons continued for over 200 years. DNA analysis in 2014 convinced scientists that Spotted Green Pigeons were a genuine, extinct species. Spotted Green Pigeons were only very distantly related to Feral Pigeons found in Liverpool and cities around the world.

Continue reading →

Seeing With Their Eyes A Poetic Reflection on the 2025 ‘From Collections to Connections’ NatSCA Conference Presentation

Written by Pauline Rutter – Independent Archival Artist, Community and Organisation Poet.

These words look out from the page with eyes I have borrowed. Eyes not shaped for vision through the specific disciplinary scientific lens. Eyes that strain to see beyond past centuries of debate on what, of all origins, is knowable and what is not. With these original eyes, would ways of seeing allow the light to travel outwards resisting funnelled perspectives and interpretations descended from imperialistic systems of Enlightenment science, colonial ideologies and narratives? In this context my eyes had opened up unevolved or re-evolved with lepidopteran vision, though not removed from all that had been taught to be seen. New eyes with sight of intensified colour that amplified nature’s interconnecting patterns, only visible outside the spectrum of the everyday, the expected, the predetermined. 

What use is butterfly sight that transforms configured objects and living matter with or without full binominal species names, into fragments like those of the intertwined and metamorphosed elements in ritualistic rapture spreading out across a Wangechi Mutu collage? 

Continue reading →