Volume 8, Issue 1

The co-editors of International Public History discuss two major innovations in the history of the journal: that from Volume 8, Issue 1 (May 2025) it will be fully open-access and, for the first time, articles will appear in non-English languages. They take the opportunity to reflect on the journal’s first seven years and anticipate where it might go in the future.

In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World is a first-of-its-kind exhibition developed by a group of international curators, historians, and cultural practitioners, and is the product of a multi-year collective called the Global Curatorial Project (GCP). The GCP formed in 2014 to address key questions on how we think about, interpret, and discuss the histories of global racial slavery and colonialism with broad publics in institutions around the world. The subsequent exhibition developed by the GCP, In Slavery’s Wake, opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. in December 2024. The creation of the exhibition centered the voices of descendants of enslaved and colonized people, through which an archive titled Unfinished Conversations was developed with more than 150 oral history interviews from around the world. The members of the GCP sought to create a model of the vital role that museums and public-facing institutions can play in fostering and advancing conversations around the legacies of slavery and colonialism on both local and global terrain that reach past conventional boundaries of race, nation, and language. This article explores the transformative process of exhibition creation and collaboration that worked to decolonize the exhibition-making process, push institutional boundaries, and forge pathways for future work that decenters the nation-state toward a global understanding of how we continue to live in the wake of racial slavery and colonialism.

The Sensational Museum, a UK-based, multi-institution research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), aims to challenge ableist biases in heritage sectors. The project explores how the potential of ‘multisensory’ can be leveraged to create inclusive, equitable experiences for both museum professionals and visitors. Led by the concepts of disability gain, equity, and inclusion, the project argues that no one sense should be necessary or sufficient to have rich and meaningful experiences with history and heritage. In this audio recording and descriptive transcript, Sophie Vohra and Charlotte Slark discuss their research for The Sensational Museum, and the value and impact of multisensory storytelling in their work. Using a drum from the Africa Museum as a reoccurring talking point, they expand on the complexities of shifting mindsets and practices to provide more inclusive, progressive and equitable multisensory encounters with museum collections. With insights from Canadian-based professional audio describer, J.J. Hunt, they explore how multisensory language can provide nuanced, rounded, and enhanced descriptions of museum collections and interactions with them. Moving to explore how multisensory storytelling can be embedded in interpretation and communication, Vince Dziekan shares how we can apply his ‘body, mind, soul’ framework to explore multidimensional ways to shape museum interpretation for visitors to meaningful connections with the collections. Overall, they demonstrate how multisensory storytelling can be applied to collections and communication and highlight the important role multisensory language and interpretation have in making museums more accessible, equitable and inclusive.

Thirteen public historians from Africa and Latin America consider the question: What does the internationalization of public history mean from the perspective of the Global South? The question guided a conversation that took place at the 7th World Conference of the International Federation for Public History in September 2024 at the University of Luxembourg. We begin with the English version of the discussion followed by the Spanish and Portuguese translations. In a separate article, IPH invited three public historians from South and Southeast Asia to contribute their thoughts having read this dialogue.

Three public historians from South and Southeast Asia consider the questions posed by the organizers of the Dialogue between African and Latin American public historians that feature also in this issue of the journal. We begin with the English version of the discussion followed by the Spanish and Portuguese translations.