Natasha Barrett

Originally from London, I lived in Aotearoa/New Zealand for 11 years working in the GLAM sector - galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I moved back to the UK in May 2014 and started my PhD in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in October 2014.

I am researching colonial era photographs of Māori (the indigenous Polynesian people of NZ) and their material culture - the production and dissemination of these photographs overseas and their historical and contemporaneous use in exhibitions in British museums.

I am interested in exploring:

• photographs as 3D museum objects with social biographies, materiality and their own agency and affect
• notions of indigenous agency in colonial photographs and entangled hybridised uses of photography beyond a Western scopic regime
• the relationship between photographs and other museum objects
• how photographs might be used in bicultural and multicultural exhibitions to address the colonial past and postcolonial present and express Mātauranga Māori/a Māori knowledge and worldview.