People, Community and Museums in Cities of Migration

In spring 2015, Poushali Mitra embarked on a three-month educational trip to England and South Africa to engage with migrant communities, obtain first-hand knowledge of their challenging lifestyle, and experience how local museum reflect their experience. In this guest blog post, she reflects on her own professional development during the trip.

As a migrant myself, and working with fellow migrant communities (those arriving for economic and freedom privileges) in Edmonton, I often ask myself what should a contemporary museum in cities of migration, such as ours, look like? Should museums be timeless time-keepers? Should museums be without walls? Should museums be social history projects? Is its role to keep alive tangible collective community memory or should it engage in nation building by displaying epic times artefacts? Or is it just about the art of storytelling?Last Spring, through EHC’s Educational Travel Grant I had the privilege to explore some of these questions. I packed my bags and went “museum window shopping” to find how the lives of people—everyday types, not the dynastic types—are captured in other cities of migrations.I started this professional development journey in Bristol.

First Stop: M-Shed in Bristol, EnglandApril 2015

Bristol’s summer celebrations.The long stretch of walls allow ten neighbourhoods to display memorabilia items ranging from special occasion items such as family wedding gown, flood markers, telephone set used to express first “coming out”, letters sent by a migrant husband to his wife, telegrams, money receipts, work wears and newspaper stories of success of refugees from Uganda and Somalia – all tell tales of Bristol.

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The Worker’s Museum in the City of Johannesburg is a historical museum in a downtown cultural precinct area where protests against apartheid regime ruled the days before 1994. The single storied building was designed in 1913 and was used as a quarter for apartheid government labourers—migrants from villages in South Africa and neighbouring countries.

This short journey helped me to connect better with people who move to places for work and freedom. Especially the South African museum experience broadened my knowledge about systemic exploitation of labour. The  “told” story is always that migrants and refugees leave home in choice of better freedom and economic options. This is true. But the untold story behind leaving home, working under constraints, keeping alive the sense of belonging, hellos and goodbyes with friends and families and settling up a new life in a new world—the trajectory is never ending.In museums in Bristol, Bo-Kaap or Johannesburg I noticed a consistent effort to document and share these stories in an enterprising low cost manner. This can be a start up model in ours, too.© Poushali Mitra, 2015