BELONG
Belonging Through Heritage: Community-Led Citizen Inquiry in Cross-National Museum Contexts
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BELONG works with adults in Milton Keynes and Cardiff who are rarely represented in museum collections, inviting them to curate heritage materials alongside their own stories and to shape the AI tools that support this work.
Overview
Adults from ethnic minority communities, recent migrants, low-income households, and people with no prior research experience are rarely represented in museum collections, and they remain largely absent from the citizen science built around heritage. BELONG examines whether taking part in curation can build a sense of belonging that does not depend on a long attachment to place.
The project operates at two sites, in England and Wales: Milton Keynes Museum and Living Archive MK, and National Museum Wales in Cardiff. Sixteen adults, eight at each site, take part in participatory design workshops, with the museum and archive partners leading recruitment through their community networks.
In Phase 1, participants work with physical objects and paper records. They handle items from the collections, read the catalogue entry for each one, find something the entry leaves out, and write their own record in their own words. When the records are laid side by side and grouped, participants are carrying out the first stages of research: observing closely, turning curiosity into answerable questions, separating evidence from plausible guesses, and reading across items to identify patterns.
Phase 2 moves the same work onto nQuire (https://nquire.org.uk/), the OU's citizen inquiry platform, where participants build a personally meaningful shared collection of items, drawn from the collections or from their own lives, and respond to what others have added. The final session turns curation into co-design: participants describe what felt slow or difficult on the platform, then propose features (including AI ones) that would help, such as tagging support, multilingual input, plain-language explanations, or an audio note in place of typing.
The BELONG outcomes are both immediate and longer term: participants gain research and digital skills, and the features they specify enter the nQuire development roadmap, shaping a platform used well beyond this project. BELONG also gives partner museums and archives a method they can reuse and produces evidence for larger programmes of inclusive heritage science.
The role of IET
IET brings the research base the project depends on: citizen science with non-specialist participants, co-design methods, evaluation of informal and community learning, and the nQuire platform. BELONG extends that work into heritage settings and into communities that citizen science has not reached.
The museum and archive partners lead participant recruitment and choose the collection items, drawing on their community networks and knowledge of the collections
Funders
- Open Societal Challenges
Partners
- OU Wales
- National Museum of Wales
- Milton Keynes Museum
- Milton Keynes Living Archives