Engaging with ethical disagreements in museums
Culture& is proud to announce our first academic peer-reviewed publication with the Journal of Cultural Property for the Reimagining Museums project.
The essay explores two participative methodologies – a trial and interactive workshop – to test ethical disagreement on ancestral human remains in museums.
The display of ancestral human remains in museums is a contentious ethical issue, raising concerns around the dignity and respect for ancestral lived lives versus the role of remains for education and scientific enquiry.
Against the backdrop of recent debates sparked by the deinstallation of ancestral remains at several museums (e.g., the removal of the Shuar tsantsas at the Pitt Rivers Museum) and revisions of national and international ethics codes, Reimagining Museums aims to create inclusive spaces to support ethical decision making and practice.
Workshops used digital participation technologies to support an accessible mode of participation that was anonymous – allowing attendees to express opinions about emotive and challenging subjects, such as ancestral human remains. For both examples, attendees and participants identified key priority and action areas for the sector and within their places of work.
This publication marks the beginning of the Antitheses Research Platform multi-year project, with the University of Oxford funded by Wellcome, which is investigating value and ethical disagreements and polarisation within museums. Culture& anticipates future academic peer reviewed publications to emerge from this work.
You can read the full paper online here.
Image source: Horse of Selene from the East Pediment of the Parthenon: British Museum, London. Photo Yujia Wang. Words from Francis et al. 2026.