When I started at Reuben I wasn’t thinking about a museum exhibition. It was early 2020, so I was mostly focused on surviving home schooling and lockdown. I had worked with the developers of the Alice in Typhoidland exhibition and had seen the potential to engage students and the public in science. For many of us who live in Oxford, the Museum of Natural History becomes an important part of our lives. Even when you have visited many times it remains a great free resource for showing off to visitors, for entertaining children on cold or wet days, and for attending events. I had spent many a Saturday morning there with my daughter when she was young, and have enjoyed various exhibitions there over the years.
With our first cohort of students in 2021, we started hosting our Dining with Dinosaur events at the Museum. At the end of one of these early events, I went up to see Janet Stott, a Reuben Fellow and Deputy Director at the Museum, and asked her how they decide on the subjects for exhibitions. Her response was "I have been meaning to talk to you about that". And so began a two-year journey.
My motivation for a collaboration with Janet was to engage a wider audience in our work, moving beyond our traditional policy and academic audiences. In the REACH programme, we use government funding from the UK to research water security in Africa and South Asia and use that evidence to co-design solutions with overseas governments and agencies. We have demonstrated new science on climate information, drinking water service delivery, river water pollution, and water security inequities that have helped develop new approaches benefitting millions of people.
Throughout the process of putting together the Fair Water? exhibition, collaboration was critical. For Janet, the collaboration provided a chance to present a different kind of exhibition that engaged with policy and an international and diverse range of scientists. Janet's team interviewed researchers from across the team to understand what we considered most exciting about our work, and created the exhibition to communicate our work to public audience. As scientists who spend years learning to communicate our work precisely and succinctly to specialist audiences, communicating our beloved work in ways that public audiences can engage with is not always easy.
The Fair Water? exhibition that is on now in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History represents a milestone for the College, not just because it is a first, but because it is a product of the College’s collaborative and interdisciplinary ethos. We are excited to continue the collaboration with the Museum of Natural History, and to share more of the amazing research that our students and Fellows produce with our community.
- Katrina Charles, Reuben College Sloane Robinson Fellow
