‘It’s not possible to decolonise the museum without decolonising the world,’ Azoulay has stated. The work of this writer, filmmaker and photography theorist has been broadly influential for 20 years, and her audience is spreading well beyond academia – unsurprising, given Azoulay’s focus on the imagery, archives and legacies of imperial thinking. The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), written in response to the circulation of images resulting from the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, called for viewership accountability amid ever-increasing circulation, and it has only become more relevant. Such a dynamic approach has more recently been applied to museum holdings in her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) and films including Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), as well as in an exhibition of drawings (made from archival photos she wasn’t permitted to reproduce) this year in Bristol. Describing herself as ‘an Arab Jew and a Palestinian Jew of African origins’, the Brown University professor tackled her own family history this year in her book The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (2024).