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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.
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 Caring for and about university legacy medical collections | University College Cork.
Presentations
Welcome and opening provocations
University reckonings with specimened remains of the bioconscripted dead. Órla O’Donovan, Applied Social Studies, University College Cork
Dialogue across different disciplines of the dead 1
Chair: Barra O'Donnabhain, Archaeology, University 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 University, 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: Róisín O’Gorman, Theatre, University College Cork
Sean Hynes, Professor of Pathology, University of Galway, Preserving histories, informing futures: a pathologist's view on university medical collections
Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge, Production, Stockholm University. Disturbing bioarchives: the case for a hauntological ethics
Dialogue across different disciplines of the dead 3
Chair: Louise Burke, Professor of Pathology, University College Cork
Thomas Champney, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, University of Miami, The development of recommendations for legacy anatomical collections: a tale of two approaches
Njabulo Chipangura, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Maynooth University, 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, University College Cork with contributions from: Joan Power, Chair of Museum Board, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland; Margaret Werry, Professor of Performance Studies, University of Minnesota; Paolo Viscardi, Keeper of Natural History, National Museum of Ireland.