Caring for and about university legacy medical collections
Background
This project responds to the complex challenges of caring for and about university legacy collections. Universities internationally are being forced to reckon with legacies of their colonial pasts and histories including the use of bodies of the disenfranchised dead as resources. In Ireland, the Human Tissue (Transplantation, Post-Mortem, Anatomical Examination and Public Display) Act 2024 brings further urgency to these challenges due to its requirements that any “storage, handling, transportation, disposal or return” of human bodies or body parts must “have due regard to the dignity, bodily integrity and privacy of the deceased person.”
The goals of the project are to:
- bring feminist and decolonial ideas about care and decolonisation of the university into conversation with legal and bioethical debates about the dead, and medical museum debates about the pedagogical and research potentials of legacy collections.
- foster new collaborations involving researchers from the social sciences, humanities, law and medicine, members of the public, and museum specialists.
Research questions
- What are the current approaches to and challenges facing care of legacy medical collections in Ireland?
- What are the new challenges of caring for these collections posed by the 2024 Human Tissue Act?
- How/can the combined insights of different disciplinary and public debates about care of the dead body and body parts help us to re-imagine more careful and just futures for legacy medical collections?
Activities
Project activities include interdisciplinary workshops that will review current approaches to and challenges facing care of legacy medical collections in Ireland and internationally, and consider how feminist decolonial theorising and activism encourage us to rethink that care; site visits to legacy collections in University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and the National Museum of Ireland; preliminary collaborative case study research with a 19th century pathology collection in UCC into its history of use and possible futures.
The Interdisciplinary Research Team at UCC
Dr. Órla O’Donovan (School of Applied Social Studies, UCC), Professor Louise Burke (Department of Pathology, University College Cork), Professor Mary Donnelly (School of Law, University College Cork), Dr. Barra O’Donnabhain, (Department of Archaeology, University College Cork), Dr. Róisín O’Gorman, (Department of Theatre, University College Cork).