Session: #411

Round table (without formal abstracts, only list of confirmed discussants / session co-organisers to be provided)

Over the past several decades, archaeologists, biological anthropologists, medical historians, and museum professionals have discussed the ethics of curating, exhibiting, and carrying out research on human remains. As part of these debates – often drawing on postcolonial critique and decolonization tropes, we have seen the formulation and implementation of new best practices, ethical guidelines, and sometimes even laws to regulate the field, but despite these changes, many fundamental ethical challenges remain unsolved. Ethics are multidimensional and not static. Many proposed solutions carry their own problems, and at the same time, the debates inside and beyond the field are creating pressures that may lead us to identify “quick fixes” rather than thought through processes. Adding to the persistence of fundamental ethical challenges, the debate is currently moving into new areas of concern. New categories of human remains emerge as problematic, new methods and new tools and practices (from DNA analyses to Open Access and Open Data), present entirely new challenges. The culture in which our work is situated has also changed, and we now need to carefully consider dimensions such as privacy and dignity of our subjects, in the new and often unregulated spaces of social media. In this roundtable we will move beyond the dominating debates about the ethics of human remains and explore these new and emerging challenges, and how they relate to fundamental dilemmas concerning human remains.

human remains, ethics, collection managing, exhibition, DNA, Open Science

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We already have a confirmed list of participants for this roundtable.

Liv Nilsson Stutz (Sweden) ¹

Sarah Tarlow (United Kingdom) ²
Mari Tõrv (Estonia) ³