Between 2019 and 2020 I circulated a survey amongst curators working with ethnographic collections in the UK*. The aim was to establish the ethnic composition of the curatorial workforce, its socioeconomic background, and typical routes into curation. The survey was a response to the widely held assumption that the workforce was overwhelmingly white and upper middleclass, and that unpaid volunteer positions represent the most common means of starting off a career in curation. I also trailed a programme which invited anthropology master's students who identified as BAME or who had no family history of higher education to spend a day with a curator leaning about what the job entailed.

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The rationale behind my research was to establish with quantitative means some of the lived experience shortcomings of the curatorial workforce and to propose the beginnings of a methodology through which to address these shortcomings.

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*Crowley, Tom. Forthcoming. Surveying the Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Backgrounds of Ethnography Curators.