1st Edition
Ethics of Contemporary Collecting
Ethics of Contemporary Collecting addresses pressing and pertinent issues around ethical contemporary collecting, reflecting on how practices are evolving or in flux.
Across three sections, each containing live sector subjects from the climate crisis, to digital collecting, through to centring communities, this book collates a combination of case studies and in-depth chapters by leading practitioners working in the field. These pieces are instructive and provide practical, transferable examples of how people have approached these challenges. It highlights examples of leading practice in the field and illustrates ethical approaches to contemporary collecting as work in this area progresses and our conversations about it advance. To reflect this ongoing growth, the book closes with an ‘Activations’ section of discussion prompts intended to keep the conversations and progress – on individual, institutional, and societal levels – going.
Ethics of Contemporary Collecting is an indispensable tool for informing, training and educating the next generation of curators and collection professionals, and inspiring future collecting projects.
Introduction
About the Editors
List of Images and Tables
Collecting a moment
1.0 Collecting a Moment: Introduction
Jen Kavanagh
1.1 Making the Future: Contemporary Collecting at National Museums Northern Ireland
Karen Logan and Hannah Crowdy
1.2 How Did We Get Here? A Reflection on Collaborative Research in Action
Elinor Morgan
1.3 Decapitated Monuments to Colonial Administrators of India at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai
Laharee Mitra and Rebecca Senior
1.4 Antisemitism and Racism: Collections in Transformation
Isabel Enzenbach
1.5 Challenges, Risks and Rewards: Contemporary Conflict Collecting at Imperial War Museums
Amanda Mason
1.6 The Ethics of Response-ability in Collecting Spontaneous Memorials
Kostas Arvanitis, Larysa Bolton, Jenny Marsden, Eleanor Mckenzie and Amanda Wallace
1.7 Mass Observing COVID-19
Jessica Scantlebury and Kirsty Pattrick
Responsible futures
2.0 Responsible Futures: Introduction
Ellie Miles
2.1 Climate Action and Ethics at the Horniman
Nick Merriman
2.2 Problem Plastics at the People’s History Museum
Sam Jenkins
2.3 Minting New Collection Challenges: A Reflective Analysis of the Ethical Dilemmas Around Collecting NFTs
Gabi Arrigoni and Livia Turnbull
2.4 New and Emerging Ethical Considerations for Digital Collecting in Museums
Arran J. Rees
2.5 Collecting as Emergency Response in the Earth Crisis
Bridget McKenzie
2.6 Experience of Non-custodial Collecting through the Contemporary Ecomuseum Model:
A Case Study of Taoyuan City Daxi Wood Art Ecomuseum in Taiwan
I-Ching Lin and Chun-Ni Chiu
Centring communities
3.0 Centring Communities: Introduction
Rosamund Lily West
3.1 Echoes of Holloway Prison: Collecting Complex Stories
Roz Currie
3.2 Punk Polyvagal in a Polycrisis: Remaking Museums in a Time of Social and Ecological Collapse
Jess and Matt Turtle
3.3 Collecting Victorian COVID-19 Experiences: Mine, Yours or Ours?
Michelle Stevenson, Alice Cannon and Rebecca Carland
3.4 What to Take and What to Leave Behind: Contemporary Ethical Collecting for a Museum in Oxford
JC Niala
3.5 The Power of Patient Perspectives: Exploring Participatory Collecting with Patient Groups in a Medical Museum
Mieneke te Hennepe and Leonie Wingen
3.6 Critical Reflection on ‘Telling Stories: Experiences of Bereavement During the COVID-19 Pandemic’
Natasha Vicars, Mary Hodgson and Olivia Mathurin-Essandoh
3.7 Centring the Donor at the Royal College of Nursing
Teresa Doherty
3.8 Ethics and Problems of Museumization in the Current Montane Environment Using Examples from the Slovak Republic
Helena Galková, Daniel Harvan and Richard R Senček
Conclusion
Activations and Further Reading
Biographies of the Authors
Index
Biography
Jen Kavanagh is a freelance curator and oral historian based in London.
Dr Ellie Miles is a curator and researcher based in London.
Rosamund Lily West is a lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.
Susanna Cordner is a Senior Research Fellow at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK.
