Our Third Community workshop on the theme of ‘Time and Navigation’ was held on June 12, 2026 at the History of Science Museum. Community participant researchers handled museum objects connected with timekeeping and navigation across various cultures, places, and time-periods, from early modern astrolabes to modern sundials and sextants, including those connected to the East India Company and the Royal Navy in the 1800s. 

The objects invited questions of the changing conception of time, as timekeeping devices were transformed for purposes of navigation by merchants and imperial powers, and for production in industry. Participants observed how plural conceptions of time and time-keeping embodied in these objects challenged the identification of the ‘modern’ with secular clock-time, and the need for a more heterogeneous understanding of measuring time and temporality. This understanding would include incense sticks, hoary quadrants, sun dials, and oil lamps alongside newer sophisticated astronomical instruments. 

The workshop also included a presentation by our Librarian and Archivist, Dr. Lee T. MacDonald, on the history of navigation and time-keeping in the modern era drawn from his research on the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Lee’s talk also included the fascinating story of daily photographs of sunspots taken at observatories across the British Empire, including the Dehradun station (run by the Great Trigonometric Survey) and Kodaikanal. You can read more about Lee’s work on the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in his Open Access book here.

At the second Colonial Standards workshop, Tools and Measures of the Trade, we were invited to think with museum objects. The workshop encouraged us to see measurement and standardisation as social and political practices. What does it mean to measure land, trade, value, distance or accuracy? Who decides what counts as a correct measurement? And what is left out when museums organise knowledge through these categories?

One of the most valuable aspects of the workshop was the way participants collectively questioned museum interpretation. During a discussion about a coin linked to the East India Company or Zanzibar, participants began doing provenance research in real time. One person recognised the East India Company connection, another translated markings on the coin, while others questioned whether the date or attribution attached to the object was accurate. It was a small but powerful example of what can happen when interpretation is opened up. Expertise did not belong only to the museum or the object label.

The workshop helped me think more deeply about measurement itself. Measurement, usually understood as units and precision, is also tied to control. Its systems have never been neutral and have obscured other ways of knowing and valuing the world. Conversations during the workshop about counting on the creases of our fingers, measuring garments using handspans, estimating ingredients by eye while cooking and older South Asian systems such as the ratti (traditionally used to weigh gemstones) reminded me that measurement is also rooted in everyday practice and embodied knowledge. These forms of measurement may not appear in museum records or official archives, but they remain important ways of making sense of the world.

The workshop also made me think critically about the language of community participation. Projects like this often refer to “the community” as if it is a single, unified group. However, everyone in the room had different relationships to South Asia, Britain, museums and colonial histories. Community is not a monolith and participation alone cannot resolve existing inequalities.

There was also a visible hierarchy between the museum and participants, and between institutional research and lived experience. The project invited us to contribute to a Reference Guide to the Missing, an ambitious and generous idea. But co-authorship is complicated. Who decides what enters the guide? What forms of contribution are recognised as knowledge? Reflections, drawings, performances, emotions, silences and disagreements are all reactions. They, however, are not all equally easy to record within institutional outputs.

This is where I felt both the promise and the tension of the workshop most strongly. We were encouraged to explore alternative knowledge systems, while still largely working through museum and academic frameworks. A decolonial approach cannot simply add more voices to an existing structure; it must also question how that structure shapes what can be said, recorded, valued, and remembered.

For me, the workshop’s most meaningful moments were not ones of consensus but of uncertainty. When participants questioned ‘accuracy’, when a coin’s provenance became a collective investigation, and when participants asked what would happen after the project ended. These moments showed that measurement is not only about standards. It is also about power: who measures, who is measured, and what forms of knowledge become measurable.

Perhaps the Reference Guide to the Missing should not only document what is absent from museum labels, but also what is difficult to capture in museum records at all: uncertainty, disagreement, memory, and the feeling of encountering an object that both does and does not belong to you. These experiences remind us that standards are never purely technical.

The community workshops of the Colonial Standards project seek to bring members of the South Asian diaspora community in conversation with the collections in the History of Science Museum. The workshops aim to address notions of authority, neutrality, and justice considered to be inherent in measuring objects and scientific instruments held in a museum devoted to the history of science. It also asks how the South Asian community can meaningfully shape the research agenda and inform the interpretation of museum objects related to the colonial history of South Asia, thus making these objects and histories more immediate and accessible to wider publics.  

‘We questioned: who has access to knowledge, who gets to inform research on museum objects and how can we reclaim agency in the history of these objects? In order to address these questions we developed a series of workshops that invited members of South Asian communities to explore scientific instruments held in the museum’s collections. By recognising that participants are experts of their own knowledge, and that their lived and professional insights are essential to understanding the history of measurement, we aim to work collaboratively to build a community toolkit.’

‘Our primary goal is to shift the museum from being a ‘sole authority’ to a ‘collective authority’.’

–  The New Cartographers

Our First Community Workshop held on February 16, 2026 at the History of Science Museum, Oxford and its off-site storage facility was on the theme of ‘Land Measures and map-making’. Community participant researchers handled objects related to the measurement of land, including theodolites, perambulators, a Gunter chain, cross-staff, plane tables, etc. There was a particular emphasis on objects connected to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and the East India Company officials who undertook this grand geodetic project in nineteenth century India. Participants engaged with questions of provenance, materiality, utility, and aesthetics of the objects. They questioned the social relationships and forms of power that were obscured in the museum’s presentation of these objects as scientific objects. They also asked how colonial knowledge of measuring and metrology related to local ways of knowing and measuring land or distance. You can read more about this first workshop in our booklet.

Colonial Standards Booklet Feb 2026