The Museum as Battleground: Exhibitions, Activism and Empire in Britain, 1945-1980

This talk explores the complex entanglement of professional museum exhibition practices with anti-imperial activism in post-war Britain. Drawing on archival evidence and oral histories in museums across the UK, it reveals how curators, designers and ethnographers navigated the tensions between institutional neo-imperial agendas and emerging decolonial movements.

It also examines how visitors exposed imperial violence through protest, correspondence, and critique. While exhibitions often reinforced colonial hierarchies through intent, design and narrative, museum professionals, and indeed their audiences, increasingly challenged these structures – sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly – through activist affiliations and critical reinterpretations of ethnographic collections. By foregrounding post-war curatorial agency and dissent (and its limits) this talk investigates the potential of exhibition-making as a site of resistance and social justice within the evolving landscape of museum practice today.

Chair: Jennie Morgan, University of Stirling

Claire Wintle is Principal Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art and Design History at the University of Brighton. She is Director of the University’s Centre for Design History and her latest book, Museums in the Wake of Empire: Global Collections in Post-war Britain, is forthcoming with Yale University Press.