Young people in museums: representation, anti-racism, and poetry as pedagogy

Museums in the UK perpetuate inequalities through colonial collections, problematic artefact narratives and institutional whiteness. Within this context, young people from racialised backgrounds remain largely absent from heritage spaces and interpretive frameworks, limiting inclusive representation. How might we interrupt this state of affairs, and does the introduction of a new politics and set of pedagogies, such as poetry, offer space for rethinking and reworking representation? This paper foregrounds this question through engaging in poetry workshops, co-developed with a Collective, as a means of building anti-racist praxis. Using arts-based, participatory methods, the project engaged young people in creating poetry that reclaimed space for underrepresented histories. This paper explores both the workshop process and the participants' creative outputs, providing evidence that poetry can develop anti-racist praxis within cultural institutions. To ensure lasting change, such practices must be embedded in ongoing commitments to anti-racism and power-sharing within museums and the wider cultural sector.