#ReconstructionWork: Can the museum be decolonised?

Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and translated into more than 30 languages). Her account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Cairo: a City Transformed, came out in January 2014. Her collection of essays, Mezzaterra (2004), has been influential and her articles for the Guardian in the UK are published in the European and American press. In 2007 Ms Soueif co-founded the Palestine Festival of Literature which takes place annually in occupied Palestine. In 2020, after serving for 7 years, she resigned from the British Museum Board of Trustees. 

www.ahdafsoueif.com

Twitter: asoueif

Facebook: Ahdaf Soueif

Mohammed Ali is an award-winning artist, curator and producer, and a trustee of Birmingham Museums. He has been commissioned to work internationally with leading galleries, festivals, arts centres and theatres to produce large scale murals in open spaces in the communities where people work, live and play. Mohammed is the founder of Soul City Arts, a leading independent arts organisation based in Birmingham that has worked with artists, academics and activists from around the world to commission and present innovative exhibitions, performances and digital installations. He has worked extensively in places like Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, New York and South Africa.

Sado Jirde is the director of Black South West Network (BSWN), a charity focused on human rights, equality, access to knowledge and socio-economic inclusion within the framework of advocating on behalf of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities. She sits on various advisory groups and committees including the WECA Cultural strategy group, the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Afrikans Legacy Steering Group, Voice for Change England, the Baobab Foundation Steering group, and the Coalition for Race Equality organisation (CoRE) nationally. Amongst other accolades, she was most recently listed as a Women of Inspiration: 100 social enterprise leaders showing Covid who’s boss in 2020 and awarded West Woman of the Year – Most Inspirational Role Model in 2019.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is an educator and poet who disrupts narratives of race, history and knowledge in her writing and workshops. She is the author of ‘Postcolonial Banter’ (2019), host of the Breaking Binaries podcast, and published in multiple anthologies and national media publications. Her work has millions of views online.

Bridget Byrne is director of the ESRC Centre – CoDE (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity and Inequality) and is currently directing a large project examining the impact of Covid19 on racialised and minoritised groups. Bridget’s numerous published works include the books ‘White lives: the interplay of ‘race’, class and gender in everyday life (Routledge), which was was joint winner of the BSA Philip Abrams Award 2006, ‘Making Citizens: public rituals and

Orsod Malik is the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Executive Director. He is a UK-based Sudani curator, writer, producer and digital strategist. Orsod’s curatorial approach focuses on identifying cultural and political entanglements in archival materials to explore possible shared histories. He is particularly interested in developing pedagogical tools and techniques to make transnational anticolonial struggles, histories, concepts and critiques accessible to a general public. Orsod is the Curator and Digital Strategist at the International Curators Forum (ICF). He has curated exhibitions at Black Cultural Archives and Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva). He was also the 2021 Archivist-in-Resident at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD) based in Accra Ghana.