Hey! I’m   Sara Akhlaq.

I grew up in Pakistan. I have been living in Germany for past couple of years.
I am a   researcher and a museum practitioner.   Sometimes, I also delve into  designing.


I'm currently working at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin on the project 'Virtual access to fossil and archival material from the German Tendaguru Expedition (1909-1913)'. Along with that, I also am pursuing a PhD at the Chair of Humanities Data Science and Methodology at TU Darmstadt.

My goal is to apply social justice frameworks to digital museum collections. In my museum work and my research, I inspect structures of authoritative power in museum collection data and the resistance to these oppressive structures, by inspecting it through an intersectional feminist and anti-colonial lens.

more about me


Recent activities

01.02.2025 - 30.11.2025

Awarded TheMuseumLab 2025 fellowship. Theme of this year is 'Colonialism and Resistance'.

03.03.2025

New publication: Díez Díaz, V., Akhlaq, S., Kaiser, K. et al. (2025). Nat. Rev. Biodivers. 1, 145–146 (2025). Digitization as a research methodology in colonial natural history collections. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00031-2

22.12.2024/2025

New Publication: Depraetere, M., Akhlaq, S., Díaz, V.D., Heumann, I., Schwarz, D. (2025). Virtual Access to Fossil & Archival Material from the German Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1913): More Than 100 years of Data-Meta-paradata Management for Improved Standardisation.In: Ioannides, M., Baker, D., Agapiou, A., Siegkas, P. (eds) 3D Research Challenges in Cultural Heritage V. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15190. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78590-0_8

01.03.2024 - Present

Organising and facilitating series of internal workshops, as part of the project Virtual access to fossil and archival material from the German Tendaguru Expedition (1909-1913), in order to discuss just representation of musuem data of colonial nature

10.07.2024 - 11.07.2024

Organised and facilitated workshop, titled Thinking Through Tendaguru Dinosaurs, with Tanzanian Scholars in order to discuss highliting colonial influences in museum data

28.02.2024

Talk during the event series 'Kolloquium Provenienzforschung' on the topic Power and Agency in Data Infrastructures of Museum and Archival Collections at German Lost Art Foundation