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Remaking medical museums as sites of ongoing reckoning and repair?
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This symposium explored complex and contentious questions about the future of university legacy medical collections. It was a hybrid event that attracted disciplinary-diverse and international participation.
Overview
At a time of intensifying controversies about universities and their medical museums’ historical complicity in the use of dead people who were socially instituted as being on the borders of humanity and bioavailable as teaching and research materials, this intradisciplinary symposium considers complex and contentious questions about the futures in university life of legacy medical collections. Participants are invited to think together about if and how medical museums might be remade as sites of reckoning and repair.
This symposium forms part of the Collective Social Futures project .
Presentations
Welcome and opening provocations
ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã reckonings with specimened remains of the bioconscripted dead. Órla O’Donovan, Applied Social Studies, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã College Cork
Dialogue across different disciplines of the dead 1
Chair: Barra O'Donnabhain, Archaeology, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã College Cork
Lynn Scarff, Director of the National Museum of Ireland, Approaches to working with collections that reflect colonial histories and institutions of forced incarceration and historic abuse
Nina Lykke, Professor Emerita of Gender Studies, Linköping ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã, The bridge-building potentials of the metonym. On the ethical remaking of relations to past injustices and traumas through museal practices
Dialogue across different disciplines of the dead 2
Chair: RóisÃn O’Gorman, Theatre, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã College Cork
Sean Hynes, Professor of Pathology, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã of Galway, Preserving histories, informing futures: a pathologist's view on university medical collections
Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge, Production, Stockholm ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã. Disturbing bioarchives: the case for a hauntological ethics
Dialogue across different disciplines of the dead 3
Chair: Louise Burke, Professor of Pathology, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã College Cork
Thomas Champney, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã of Miami, The development of recommendations for legacy anatomical collections: a tale of two approaches
Njabulo Chipangura, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Maynooth ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã, Repatriation, reburial and rehumanisation of Ancestors from colonial contexts at Manchester Museum
Emerging conclusions and next steps
Panel chaired by Mary Donnelly, Professor of Law, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã College Cork with contributions from: Joan Power, Chair of Museum Board, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland; Margaret Werry, Professor of Performance Studies, ÉîÒ¹ÑÇÖÞ¸£Àû¾Ã¾Ã of Minnesota; Paolo Viscardi, Keeper of Natural History, National Museum of Ireland.