Community Guidelines

PortraitEMB Community Guidelines

The PortraitEMB project is committed to fostering a mutually supportive and inclusive environment for all participants to engage in productive knowledge exchange through all its elements, including, but not limited to, the PortraitEMB mailbox and comments sections on the project website. We therefore ask all users to establish and maintain respectful and professional communication by committing to the following guidelines. Please note that the terms ‘user’ and ‘users’ refers to any individual accessing or using the website, writing to the project mailbox, or registering for email updates.

  1. Professional conduct
    • 1. 1  PortraitEMB asks everyone to maintain professional etiquette, and to avoid any unprofessional posts and exchanges. ‘Unprofessional’ is here defined as any form of disrespectful, dismissive, patronising, bullying, or harassing behaviour. In the unlikely scenario that participants exhibit openly disrespectful, disruptive, or harassing behaviour, PortraitEMB reserves the right to moderate any comments on the website and, if necessary, block the user from the PortraitEMB mailbox and remove them from the mailing list.
    • 1.2  Users must respect the privacy of individuals and not disclose, share or quote comments from the community forum or other interactions.
    • 1.3 Users of the site must restrict personal details. Users should not share their own or other people’s personal details (personal emails, addresses, phone numbers) anywhere on the site (excluding details for mailing list registration).
    • 1.4 In the interests and requirements of safeguarding and privacy, users must not share school, school staff, parental, or student information.
    • 1.5 Many topics being discussed on the website concern historical injustices and tragedies relating to the subject of the British Empire and its legacies, to migration, belonging, race, sexuality, and gender, and the policies and behaviours that theories relating to these topics and concepts have supported. Whilst PortraitEMB supports the efforts of scholars to engage fearlessly with the past without attempting to sanitise it, it is the responsibility of participants to understand and confront these issues in a respectful and thoughtful manner. Please bear in mind that community members and their students may find images, texts, and individual words relating to these subjects distressing. If you believe that anything in the sources or incidents you refer to may be a cause of such distress, then please indicate this at the start of your message. If your historical sources use offensive language – for example, racial slurs – it is best to avoid citing or using this language directly. In short, if your sources contain material/language that could be deemed offensive, please reconsider using it and warn participants.
  1. Social Media
    • 2.1 Content and materials from the website must not be shared on social media sites or tweeted without explicit permission from PortraitEMB and/or the copyright holders.
    • 2.2 To tweet about the project, please use the #PortraitEMB hashtag.
    • 2.3 Please refer to PortraitEMB Guidelines 1.1 – 1.5 regarding professional conduct which extends to the use of all social media sites.
    • 2.4 Please refer to PortraitEMB Community Guidelines 3.1 – 3.3 regarding access, reuse, and copyright material restrictions.

3. PortraitEMB content

    • 3.1 PortraitEMB expects all users to check and take responsibility for terms of re-use for any content posted on the PortraitEMB website.
    • 3.2 Users are responsible for seeking permission for all images and content they wish to use, upload and download.
    • 3.3 Should users wish to download and use resources for educational purposes, it is the user’s responsibility to credit the source and check content for open access or copyright restrictions.
    • 3.4 Please refer to PortraitEMB Community Guidelines 2.1 – 2.4 regarding the restricted use of PortraitEMB material on all social media sites.