Unearthing our past: engaging with diversity at the Museum of London

The past refuses to stay still even as it enters our present and colours our future. It is an unstable category which, nevertheless, has been stilled by material evidence, scholarly research, curatorial expertise, and ideologies, wittingly or unwittingly, to do with the representations of culture, race and nation. In its unearthing of peoples’ lives, however, there remain endless stories which are concealed owing to the forgetfulness of conventional wisdom, or are ignored because they are deemed of little interest to mainstream society.