museum ethics

As a bit of a brain-fanatic, I was very excited to attend the opening of the new Wellcome Collection exhibition in London, Brains: The Mind as Matter, at the end of March. I was particularly keen to see how the stated aim to focus on the brain as object  would play out: Brains takes the […]

At an internal workshop here at Medical Museion, we recently discussed the problematic aspects of distributing objects from the collection on the web. The web surely poses a great opportunity for museums to get stuff out there and thereby to reach a broader audience – hopefully then inspiring them to an actual museum visit – […]

I have just had a paper accepted for a very interesting symposium called Representing the Contentious, organized in London 14 October by Bronwyn Parry, Ania Dabrowska and Wellcome Trust People Award. My presentation contains many images from my PhD Delineating Disease: a system for investigating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva that were not presented to the public for reasons I […]

We have just submitted an application for a major new gallery based on our anatomical and pathological specimen collections — and the in-house discussions are already becoming vigorous. How to find conceptually interesting ways to display cancer tumours, conjoined twins, and twisted torsos? What’s the balance between spectacular engagement and ethical concerns? How to make the historical collections […]

I found this interesting – consider it in light of museum materialities and aestethics: “The symposium will also consider why academic and artistic projects are subject to different degrees of ethical oversight and how the final outputs of such projects are shaped by their prospective consumption in the public domain.” See below for the full […]

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference. Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time […]

On next Thursday, 16 April, I’m contributing to a meeting on the theme “ICOM’s Code of Ethics and the grey zones of museum practise”, organized by Danish ICOM. The background for the meeting is that ICOM’s current Code of Ethics (from 2004) apparently doesn’t cover a number of ‘grey zones’, which Danish ICOM believes may be in conflict with the Code, for […]