Critical Museum Studies

We are a group of Graduate Students affilliated with the Center For Experimental Ethnography. For the past few months we have been working on critically re-imagining the Penn museum and its operation within perpetuating harmful, colonialist, and racist modes of operation, ordering, and othering. Our three major themes are examining "Ethics and Institutional Collections of Human Remains", using mapping to "Visualize and Humanize Remains," and developing an "Anticolonial Tour" to reimagine public history.

Ethics & Human Remains Collections

On April 21, 2021 Billy Penn reported that the remains of children killed during the 1985 MOVE bombing had been stored and used as teaching aids at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Museum without the consent of the victims' family. An example of the ways in which academic institutions normalize scientific racism and state violence against Black people, the ensuing controversy demanded that we critically engage the approximately 10,000 human remains that currently reside at the Penn Museum and similar institutions around the world. What are the historical processes that facilitated the traffic of human remains? What policies govern the use of human remains for anthropological research? How do we hold institutions accountable?

Mapping & Visualizations

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Anticolonial Tour

This tour focuses not on the objects within the museum, but how the museum transforms histories, heritages, and people into objects in the first place. We hope that each pause in the gallery will allow us  to “de-classify” the museum’s contents, in rupturing the ordering schemes that have classified its material, problemitizing the “class” for whom the museum is built, and for finally divulging the secrecy of its operations.

Resources

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About

Meet the members of our graduate working group.

Critical Museum Studies