About

This research aims to explore the potential of the Natural History Museum’s Chagos Coral Collection to highlight and recontextualise ecological care in the Chagos Archipelago. It aligns with contemporary efforts to analyse practices of care in the context of increasing violence against humans and non-humans and the accompanying ecological crisis. 

The Chagos Coral Collection is composed of 6,000 corals, housed at the Natural History Museum in London. The corals that form this collection were collected in the Chagos Archipelago in the 1970s during scientific-military expeditions. The collection of these corals occurred amid British colonial military occupation of the islands and at the dawn of increasing marine science research in their submerged environment. Since then, it has been globally and locally observed that coral reefs are declining, along with the diverse ecological networks they support. The Chagos Archipelago was later designated as a marine protected area (MPA) due to its rich biodiversity and aquatic life, while remaining under strict colonial control, preventing its indigenous population from returning and caring for their ecosystem. This particular collection’s social history has never been explored, highlighting the fact that natural history museums’ collections tend to be understudied in the humanities because of their perceived neutrality. 

This makes the Chagos Coral Collection central to contemporary discussions on the role of museums within environmental conservation frameworks and colonial history. It also provides an opportunity to use natural history collections as material evidence of human/non-human relationships. This can help guide research, making visible the material entanglements between ecological care, (emerged and submerged) land, and social (in)justice.

This research employs a transdisciplinary combination of methods that reflect the multidimensional nature of the collection, including archival research and creative and participatory approaches to explore ecological care. It also aims to bring a particular focus on the social ecology of the corals that form the collection by interacting with and amplifying the perspectives of those who care for and about them, including curators, conservation scientists and members of the Chagossian community in the UK.