Sarah Petter

About

Sarah is Senior Engagement Manager in Collection Care at The National Archives. In this role, she develops and manages onsite and digital engagement programmes for conservation and heritage science. She takes an audience-led approach to engagement and strives to create inclusive and accessible opportunities for audiences of all ages and abilities.

Research activity

Sarah’s work focuses on community engagement and inclusive practice. She seeks to create and facilitate encounters for diverse audiences with the materiality of archives. Through this work, she aims to bring alternate perspectives and community knowledge into the work and practices of teams in Collection Care.

Her current research explores multisensory approaches and creative practice to access, engage with, and understand the materiality of archives. Focusing on the sensory characteristics of archival records, she investigates how the feel, sound, look, and smell of records can reveal insights into their material history and condition. She explores how this approach could be used to widen access to archives for diverse audiences. Her work aims to re-centre records as multisensory objects and not just carriers of written information.

Taking a collaborative and practice-based approach to research, she works with audiences with lived experience of learning differences and disabilities. This allows her to explore multisensory approaches as both inclusive research and engagement practices. In doing this, she aims to unlock new ways for audiences to access, research and engage with archival records.