William Nsuiban Gmayi is a Senior Management member of the Ghana Museums and Monuments, and the Chair of ICOM Ghana. He is an anthropologist specialising in critical heritage, museum, and material culture studies in transcultural contexts. His research draws upon a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and participatory methods to explore how pasts are differently materialized and mediated in the present, and how they shape futures. His work examines the complex ways in which natural as well as cultural heritage is entangled in shifting regimes of value and geopolitical configurations. This has often involved re-engaging with colonial archives and collections relating to Ghana, exploring their ambiguous status as both sites of epistemic violence and, potentially, resources for communities to recover cultural histories, memories, and alternative ways of knowing and being in the world.
William is especially interested in experimenting with decolonial approaches to activating the pluriversal possibilities of historical collections and archives, not least to address the social, environmental, and planetary crises of our time.
William Gmayi has previously worked as Research Fellow at the Global Heritage Lab, at the University of Bonn; a Fellow of the British Museum’s International Training Programme; a visiting Curator at the Danish National Museum, Copenhagen; Research partner on Authoring Slavery in Ghana, a collaborative research project led by Aarhus University; and, since October 2023, he has been studying for his DPhil in social anthropology at the University of Oxford