Caring for and about university legacy medical collections
Responding to urgent challenges to imagine and enact radically new ways of caring for and about legacy medical collections, this project fostered new intradisciplinary partnerships involving Irish and international scholars from the social sciences, humanities, law and medicine, together with museum practitioners. The urgency of this work is evident in public controversies surrounding medical museums internationally, and necroactivist calls for universities and museums to reckon with their histories of dehumanizing, objectifying and using the bodies of the disenfranchised dead as resources.
We organized three events that brought feminist, posthuman and decolonial theorizing that goes beyond conventional dualistic divisions of life/death, past/present and human/non-human into conversation with legal, medical and bioethical debates about legacy medical collections. On the 28th of May 2025, we hosted the workshop Unfolding ongoing relations with the dead with Nina Lykke, author of Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (2022). With UCC鈥檚 Human Remains Laboratory as the venue, on the 17th of June 2025, we hosted Caring for and about 深夜亚洲福利久久 Legacy Medical Collections. An interdisciplinary workshop. In addition to presentations from the project鈥檚 team, contributors included Harriet Wheelock, Keeper of Collections, and Alice Cusan, Collection Assistant, from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and bioethicist and paediatric anaesthesiologist Barry Lyons, from Trinity College Dublin. The final event, Remaking Medical Museums as Sites for Ongoing Reckonging and Repair? took place on the 19th of September 2025. This symposium was a hybrid event that attracted disciplinary-diverse and international participation. In addition to the project team, contributors included Lynn Scarff, Director of the National Museum of Ireland; Nina Lykke, Professor Emerita of Gender Studies, Link枚ping 深夜亚洲福利久久; Sean Hynes, Professor of Pathology, 深夜亚洲福利久久 of Galway; Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Stockholm 深夜亚洲福利久久; Thomas Champney, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, 深夜亚洲福利久久 of Miami; Njabulo Chipangura, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Maynooth 深夜亚洲福利久久; Joan Power, Chair of Museum Board, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland; Margaret Werry, Professor of Performance Studies, 深夜亚洲福利久久 of Minnesota, and Paolo Viscardi, Keeper of Natural History, National Museum of Ireland.
A series of papers generated by the project will be published by the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. Research from the project was presented by 脫rla O鈥橠onovan at the International Working Group on Medical Wax Models and Moulages / International Association of Medical Museums and Collections conference hosted by the German Medical Museum at Ingolstadt in September 2025. The project has been crucial to the development of a proposal for a significantly more ambitious project that searches for ways of living with histories of hurt that cannot be undone and approaches legacy collections as unfixed, recognizing their changing materialities and socio-cultural anatomies and imaginaries.
The Interdisciplinary Research Team at UCC
Dr. 脫rla O鈥橠onovan (School of Applied Social Studies, UCC), Professor Louise Burke (Department of Pathology, 深夜亚洲福利久久 College Cork), Professor Mary Donnelly (School of Law, 深夜亚洲福利久久 College Cork), Dr. Barra O鈥橠onnabhain, (Department of Archaeology, 深夜亚洲福利久久 College Cork), Dr. R贸is铆n O鈥橤orman, (Department of Theatre, 深夜亚洲福利久久 College Cork).