What does it mean to search for your heritage in spaces that rarely acknowledge it? In Searching for Romanian Heritage in London Museums, a student-led ChangeMakers project at UCL, Maria Popa and Rares Muscar explore this question by revisiting London museums through the lens of their Romanian identities. With support from Ramona Gonczol (UCL SSEES), the project confronted the absence—and occasional presence—of Romanian artefacts in collections across the capital, using language, dialogue, and lived experience to challenge prevailing stereotypes. In this Q&A, they reflect on how museums can be spaces both of exclusion and (re)imagination.

1. Your ChangeMaker project, “Searching for Romanian Heritage in London Museums”, aimed to challenge stereotypical perceptions and prejudices about Romanian heritage by highlighting Romanian cultural artefacts in London museums, including the Migration Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Museum. How does your project challenge common media stereotypes about Romanian identity, and how did museum spaces help you confront or subvert those narratives? 

Rares: Growing up as children of migrants and first-generation migrants ourselves, we have faced multiple instances of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. Whether it was a ‘joke’ surrounding Romanians as migrants, comments or looks when we spoke Romanian on the street, or even simply our parents’ inability to truly interact with the system and structures surrounding them, our Romanian-ness, in my/our minds, was internalised as a drawback. I started viewing Romanian culture as an amalgamation of negative stereotypes and limited my speaking of Romanian strictly to my home environment. Thus, our project, through reconnecting with our heritage through the medium of London museums, rewrites those unjustly indoctrinated narratives we were fed in our youth. We become able to construct and understand the beauty, diversity, and legacy of the Romanian presence within London, and challenge the lifelong media stereotyping of Romanians as a ‘horde’, ‘wave’ or ‘invasion’ who are (paradoxically) filling only low-level, blue-collar jobs AND living off benefits simultaneously. Through discovering Romania’s cultural legacies present in London, we effectively subvert narratives not only by illuminating a culture which has habitually been expected to be negated, but also by demanding—through the project’s existence itself—a reframing of the unjust stereotyping of Romanian-ness, with the museum artefacts providing tangible evidence of the realities and value of Romanian cultural identity.

A Romanian friction drum from the Horniman Museum, London.

Our project’s scope also calls for the amplification of self-understanding when it comes to intercultural heritage through departmental and wider dissemination in multi-modal formats, encouraging further initiatives of this self-exploratory nature for all marginalised ethnicities and cultures. Such initiatives would include presenting at various conferences such as RAISE through podcast format, presenting with UCL ProLang through presentation/project-poster format and also, more optimistically, presenting to the Romanian community themselves possibly through the medium of Willesden Library which has a Romanian section for the extensive Brent Romanian community. This form of dissemination will have to be gauged for an engaging discussion and interaction across multiple generations while also taking into account the importance of accessibility, broader diasporic class structures, digital and cultural literacy and historical knowledge of cultural engagement. So far, we have considered project-posters and presentations alongside an open-ended discussion, however this may change drastically depending on future considerations.

2. In your project poster, you strikingly describe intercultural identities as being shaped by “an inward tug-of-war—a constant questioning, negotiation and reification of belonging, displacement, heritage, adaption, and erasure.” How did your personal experiences and identities shape the project’s aims and methodology, and did the project alter your understanding of those experiences and identities? 

Maria and Rares at the Migration Museum, London.

Rares: The feeling of an inward tug-of-war when conceptualising our own intercultural identities arose out of the necessity for code-switching. Our experiences with discrimination, degradation, and prejudice forced us to shed aspects of our identities, both Romanian and British, in specific situations. When Romanians were associated with crime, ‘invasion’, and ‘freeloading’, we had to associate ourselves with the notion of ‘the good migrant’, trying to construct a positive identity that would be accepted by the outside world.When we would speak to family members or friends back in Romania, we had to try and erase any residue of ‘British-ness’ that we had adopted in our lives, so as to not face ridicule and further accusations. The constant structuring and restructuring of our identities, and the subsequent confusion, meant that we had to understand the focality of this ‘tug-of-war’ in shaping our existences, and utilise it in an exploratory manner when forming our project.

Thus, our identities, directly shaped by our experiences of prejudice and discrimination, were not only employed in shaping the project’s aims and methodology, but were also the foundation we created our project around. We intended to create a project which would rewrite the long-standing narratives burdened upon Romanians in the UK while also being actively accessible, encouraging future similar exploratory initiatives and introspective intercultural dialogue for all. We therefore decided to utilise museums as our medium of choice, attempting to find traces of our culture within the realm of academia, a world within which Romanians are, for some reason, expected to be absent from. Supplementing this, our research interacted with multiple sociological theories such as Alina Dolea’s work on Ethnicity, Identity and the Diaspora, to refine the lens through which we were trying to understand and subvert prejudicial narratives. Our methodology also focused on reconnection and emphasising our Romanian identities, shaping our project by carrying out important conversations in Romanian, creating a symbolic but also physical link to our identities themselves.

Our project altered our understanding of our experiences and identities by bringing to light the psychological impact of discrimination and prejudice on our identities, and the fragmentation it caused. It emphasised the importance of truly grasping and celebrating your identity, even when its subversion is encouraged, and the significance of intercultural recognition for individuals of all ages, especially children, who navigate their identities without any true external support. The project enunciated the importance of rewriting injustices, and the necessity of breaking from academic rigidity so as to create the truly meaningful and emotion-focused discoveries which are often rejected by academia.

3. Your active approach to the artefacts in London Museums was very interesting—verbalising immediate impressions and deliberately holding conversations in Romanian to create “a deeper connection with our experiences and identities.” What did this feel like? Useful? Strange? Empowering? Was it a different conversation from the type you might normally have in a UCL classroom?

Maria: Speaking in Romanian to each other whilst interacting with the artefacts was natural for us, and in no way did it feel strange. I think a feeling of empowerment came through the discussions which we were having during the museum visits. Even if we felt slightly defeated that we couldn’t find as many objects as we had hoped for, it still felt freeing and powerful to be able to form an opinion on this matter. We reclaimed a sense of belonging in spaces where our identities are often underrepresented or overlooked, and therefore, speaking in Romanian simply solidified that feeling. A feeling of validation was also created through our verbal impressions of the objects, because it essentially brought us closer to the artefacts themselves. Our conversations were actually built upon what we had talked about in previous Romanian lessons at UCL, creating a full-circle moment in terms of our initial ideas within the classroom and how these developed in museum environments. In both instances, we conversed with fluidity, sometimes switching between Romanian and English as a way of expressing ideas that did not fully fit into either language. Ultimately, talking to each other in Romanian was not just about us using our maternal language, but rather instinctively using language to anchor our identities within the context of museums in London.

Rares and Maria at the Horniman Museum, London.

4. You stress the importance of “emphasising subjectivity as an important means of engaging with identity and heritage.” What challenges did you face in navigating the emotional, evolving nature of the project? 

Maria: The main challenge we faced was the fact that our emotional anticipation and expectations for our findings within the museums were not met. We entered these spaces with excitement and curiosity but left with some disappointment after seeing that the museums did not reflect the depth of Romanian identity we had hoped for. Of course, subjectivity itself lies within our disappointment, and it must be reiterated that the visits themselves can still be seen as a success, because our reactions could thus be used to share our opinions with the wider public, forming a representation of our heritage and what it means to us. The fact that the two visits prompted us to conduct more online research on Romanian objects and archives within London’s museums changed the course of the project for the better. For example, we made comments on how the descriptions in online catalogues of certain artefacts were too vague, or perhaps even incorrect. It was through the evolving nature of the project that we deepened our understanding and could become more vocal about our personal opinions on the portrayal of our Romanian identities. Navigating these difficulties? allowed us to pinpoint ideas that we did not initially think to comment on, and this itself highlights the benefits that can arise from unexpected challenges.

5. Your poster presents the project in a fascinating way, as a “dynamic and living artefact” that will promote healing and empowerment. What’s next for the project, and how do you envision it contributing to future educational and/or cultural initiatives? 

Ramona: We disseminate the project widely, through an initial e-poster, followed by this blog, then a case study for the ChangeMaker page. In September, we will create a podcast for the Research, Advancing & Inspiring Student Engagement (RAISE) conference, a student–staff collaboration conference held at the University of Glasgow. We will then present in at least two more places at UCL, inviting undergraduate students through the PROLang series and in at least one or more community hubs around London, most likely starting with the Romanian library in Willesden Green. We want to reach as many young people as possible.

The project will also be presented to subsequent cohorts of language students at UCL, including students of Romanian, as an example of identity and heritage searching in immigrant communities and what we can do outside the classroom to make their learning life relevant.

We are already thinking of a new project to follow, so watch this space!

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Ramona Gonczol is Associate Professor in Romanian Language at SSEES, UCL. She is the (co)author of Romanian and Essential Grammar (2nd edition, 2020) and Colloquial Romanian(4th edition, 2014) and the convener of the PROLang group and academic coordinator for Short Courses. Ramona is a fellow of the HEA and the recipient for the Order for Cultural Merits in Promoting Romanian Culture and Language Abroad (2018). Ramona completed 4 years of outreach projects with Secondary schools on HHCL speakers of Romanian and is carrying out research on Romanian as a HHC language. Her research interests also include language acquisition, cultural identities, language policy, multilingualism and ethnographic pedagogy. She is the staff partner in the project.

Maria Popa is a first-year student Comparative Literature student at SELCS, having chosen to study Romanian at heritage-speaker level at SSEES for her degree. Her interests focus on humanities-based subjects, ranging from world literature to history to film, building an intrigue in multicultural identities, and how these formed and further developed. Maria writes bilingual poetry too, in English and Romanian and enjoys translating between the two languages.

Rares Muscar: ‘I’ am a first year home student at SSEES UCL, born in Romania, studying Politics, Sociology and East European Studies. I am essentially interested in anything to do with the humanities overall and enjoy learning different contemporary and historical lenses of seeing and understanding societal structures and functions. My attention is also particularly drawn towards class and how it manifests itself within people, psychologically and sociologically and throughout time. Having grown up as a first-generation migrant where both parents had ‘blue-collar’ jobs, academia seemed, and still seems, like an impenetrable fortress, but working on projects such as this has allowed me (us) to carve out a space forcefully, where we are allowed to explore the intertwining of class, cultural legacies, identity etc. in its entirety, namely its emotional foundations which in my opinion are severely overlooked in favour for rigorous quantitative forms of knowledge production. I am always interested in anything which intertwines culture, ethnography, history, politics, sociology, psychology, literature and related fields. I would always be eager to engage with and would deeply appreciate any further projects or discussions that explore these interconnected themes.