The Museum of COVID-19 and Young Curators Online course are part a UCL Culture Listen and Respond and UCL Widening Participation initiative to engage students in London and around the world to explore the ways in which museums, exhibitions and collections are changing as a result of quarantine and social distancing during the global pandemic. This project has been created in collaboration with student consultants from St. Paul’s Way Trust School in East London and the teams at UCL AnthroSchools and in the UCL Ethnographic Collection.
Key People
Professor Haidy Geismar (Professor of Anthropology, UCL | SHS Vice Dean, Strategic Projects: Culture Lab) h.geismar@ucl.ac.uk
Professor Geismar is a social anthropologist with research interests in intellectual and cultural property, indigenous rights, new forms of cultural representation, the anthropology of art, critical museology and the South Pacific (especially Vanuatu and New Zealand). She now directs the Digital Anthropology programme at University College London and is also Vice-Dean for Education, co-curator of the UCL Ethnography Collections, and co-editor of the Journal of Material Culture. Visit her website here.
Dr. Alison Macdonald FHEA (Head of Teaching, UCL Anthropology | Deputy Head of Department, Outreach and WP Tutor) alison.macdonald@ucl.ac.uk
Dr. Macdonald is a social anthropologist interested in the context of educational exclusion and young people in the UK. Research funded by a 2018 Grand Challenges Adolescent Lives Grant focuses on the experiences of young people who have previously been permanently excluded from state school and attended alterative learning provisions. This involved the production of a short collaborative documentary film, People Like Us, which traced the subjective reflections and aspirations of two young men post exclusion. More information about this project can be found here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challenges/adolescent-lives
Delphine Mercier (Collections Curator, UCL Anthropology) d.mercier@ucl.ac.uk
Delphine Mercier is Collections Curator in UCL Ethnography Collection. Before joining UCL, she taught in various schools in Paris at UG and MA levels, and had several experiences in cultural organisations. She first worked on cultural, economic and technical exchanges around the Mediterranean Sea during the Middle Ages, then on cultural heritage and sustainable development with a focus on Madagascar and Haiti. She is currently working on how we engage and interact with objects (PhD research, UCL STS).
Dr. Adam Runacres AfHEA (UCL AnthroSchools Programme Officer, UCL Anthropology) adam.runacres.15@ucl.ac.uk
Dr. Runacres is an anthropologist at UCL and Programme Officer for the AnthroSchools Programme. A dedicated WP and public engagement specialist, he has delivered talks, run workshops and designed courses with different age groups on a variety of topics, including social anthropology, material culture, social media, tiger conservation and international development. He is currently leading UCL AnthroSchools in building resources for A-Level and IB students to better integrate anthropology with other subjects and recently completed his PhD on the social impacts of Indian conservation as part of the UCL Human Ecology Research Group.