Digital Community Co-creation as a Conduit for Addressing Systematic Erasures and Gaps in Shared Heritage

This chapter discusses how an ongoing, progressive, innovative, academic-policy engagement partnership in the UK between Leicestershire County Council (LCC) as a local authority and the University of Nottingham (UoN) as a higher-education provider is addressing systemic erasures and gaps in the collection, interpretation, representation, and (re)telling of queer and colonised histories in museum collections under LCC’s stewardship. The article explores this through the lens of a prominent heritage project titled Villiers Revealed. The article is structured as follows. First, it provides useful context for Villiers Revealed — tying this to LCC’s overarching objective of opening up Leicestershire Museum Collections (LMC)2 to local communities and the wider public. Second, it discusses the co-creation approach undertaken to redress underrepresentation in the collections of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities, people with disabilities, and people from the LGBTQIA+ communities. In doing so — and third, it highlights the learning gained, the ethical considerations negotiated, and the community agency cultivated for storytelling while situating these in interdisciplinary theory, method, practice, and policy.