Sara Wajid
Sara Wajid
Co-CEO, Birmingham Museums Trust
Trust and shared understanding about the value of cultural diversity is vital
One wintry day towards the end of my secondment at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG), I was in The Past is Now, an exhibition that explored Birmingham’s role within the British empire, when I spotted a petite woman quietly studying the exhibition. As she turned around, I realised that it was Rita McLean, the …
World view
Working abroad can be lucrative for British museums, but how are they tackling the ethical issues that this can raise? Sara Wajid reports
Nation shall speak culture unto nation
The launch earlier this year of the Cultural Diplomacy pamphlet from the thinktank Demos at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Raphael Gallery was a blizzard of suspiciously sexy buzz words – digital repatriation, the Olympiad, cultural ambassadors, soft power, diasporic global networks – but hubristic speeches from museum directors and government ministers aside, the big …
The internet is not just a dumping ground for content
The international brotherhood of museum web geeks were walking tall last month at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis. The worldwide success of social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube means even people who may never engage with these online social tools are now fascinated by their cultural implications (including museum …
Becoming a museum trustee seems like a good way for minorities to shape policies, so why are the opportunities available not put to better use?
Having an ethnically representative board of trustees has become accepted as a given good in the diversity world. But as the only non-white trustee in the village myself, I often wonder if it should be. In three years on the board of a national charity I didn’t increase its ethnic diversity at all. Apart from …