Arts and Humanities Place-Based Partnership: Cardiff University and Amgueddfa Cymru | Museums Wales
This year Being Human Festival selected Cardiff University as one of their flagship hubs to bring together a range of perspectives that connect research to the histories, cultures and communities of the area. Being Human Festival is led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. The Festival took place from 9 to 18 November 2023. As part of the Festival, Cardiff University teamed up with Amgueddfa Cymru | Museum Wales to provide a series of free activities around this year's festival theme of Rhyme and Reason. Events drew on a range of research spanning archaeological excavations, generative artificial intelligence, fungi collections, and colonial and industrial Welsh history. Festival events | Being Human Festival
This collaboration between Cardiff University and Amgueddfa Cymru | Museum Wales is one of the early outcomes of a 5-year strategic partnership, signed in January 2023, to enable a greater alignment of expertise, experience, and resources across the two organisations. Collaboration is at the heart of GW4 and as anchor institutions in Wales, both organisations have a long history of collaborating on addressing civic and societal issues and are committed to jointly developing regional, national, and international heritage ecosystems for the benefit of all.
Research and innovation are an enabling strategic theme across all collaborative activities envisioned for the partnership. These activities are focused around five strategic themes: safeguarding and restoring the environment; digital cultures and adaptive technologies; skills, talent and lifelong learning; and ensuring wellbeing and inclusive representation through an appreciation of heritage.
The National Trust is one of GW4’s strategic partners and we worked with curators from National Trust Cymru along with other partners on an event as part of the festival to showcase the different ways of understanding and representing labour histories from their work at Penrhyn Castle in North Wales. Audiences for this event where encouraged to take part in conversations around how best to interpret and present narratives of labour and exploitation in heritage settings of contemporary Wales.
Past successful joint collaborations have included work on the CAER Heritage project in the Ely area of Cardiff, hands-on bioscience-related projects across the Amgueddfa Cymru | Museum Wales multiple sites in Wales, and research such as the AHRC-funded, “Refugee Wales - The Afterlife of Violence”.
Forthcoming plans encompass the development of tailored courses for the next generation of heritage graduates, more bilateral staff secondments and more students and postdoctoral researchers undertaking projects, placements and internships.
The Strategic Partnership will also see academics from both institutions exploring solutions to shared challenges, such as meeting Net Zero targets and creating new ways of reaching wider and under-represented audiences through digital technologies, whilst driving innovation through adaptive technologies. These challenges align closely with GW4’s strategic priority research areas of Sustainable Net Zero, Cyber and Digital Transformation, Health and Wellbeing, and Creative Communities.
Aligning itself to Welsh Government plans and the Future Generations Act, the Strategic Partnership aims to ensure that public and community engagement through our joint activities will help individuals feel they belong and can share and participate in creativity through our heritage. As a place-based partnership, this collaboration is testament to the power of Arts and Humanities to bring people together in ways that challenge and inform their world views.
