Power of Stories: Engaging and supporting communities in urban and rural Suffolk.

Abstract

This article will explore the relationship between museums and their communities through the context of the Power of Stories, an exhibition project held in Suffolk between 2019-2021. This article will discuss power through Victoria Hollows’ (2019) idea of power-over and power-with and borrow the theory of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces from migration politics, applying it to co-curation practise. These will be within the context of co-curation in the Power of Stories case study to draw conclusions about the successes and failures of the project.Using the evaluations written from the start in 2019 to the end in 2022, interviews with individuals involved in the project at different levels and contextualising the story within Suffolk, this article discusses why this particular project is one that other museums can use as an example of good practise and learn from the curators’ experiences.