Isabel Margaret Sturges (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
isabel.sturges@kcl.ac.uk

Weathering climate change: using museum collections to represent local experiences of climate change.

Climate change can result in a profound loss of heritage, through the seasonal changes that contribute to sense of place, and the loss of cultural practices associated with particular weather conditions. Representing this loss of weather-heritage through museum collections can help communities to manage loss and memorialise weather heritage that may otherwise be forgotten. It can also provide new avenues for local peoples’ engagement by presenting climate change as something meaningful to them, rather than an abstract global phenomenon requiring expertise to fully comprehend.

This project will seek to develop a new theoretical framework for the representation of weather heritage through museum collections and will use this conceptual understanding to enrich the collections of the Museum of Cambridge, resulting in a new exhibition. The area of study is the East Anglian Fens, a region that has already lost heritage associated with fen skating, and that is liable to require managed flooding during this century due to sea level rise.

Principal Supervisor: Dr George Adamson

Supervisor at partner organisation: Annie Davis

Partner organisation: The Museum of Cambridge