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The ethics of collaboration with museums: researching, archiving and displaying home and migration

The ethics of collaboration with museums: researching, archiving and displaying home and migration
The ethics of collaboration with museums: researching, archiving and displaying home and migration
Collaboration has become an increasingly important aspect of higher education policy agendas in which impact and public engagement are regarded as crucial elements of publicly funded research. Collaborative research raises ethical issues relating to the collection, archiving and dissemination of data, but also in regard to the complex and emotional nature of relationships between participants, practitioners and academics, that are currently under‐explored. This paper examines ethical considerations raised by collaborative research with museums, drawing on doctoral research conducted in collaboration with the Geffrye Museum that examined home, work and migration among Vietnamese communities in East London. The paper examines the challenge of balancing the interests of participants with the museum's aim to document and display testimonies and images of participants’ homes. It explores the ambivalent response of participants to the archiving of their research at the museum. I examine my positionality as a researcher, reflecting on the emotions involved in collaborative research. The paper identifies contributions from museum studies that account for the multiple viewpoints involved in collaboration. In the conclusion, I suggest that the ethical issues in collaboration speak to wider challenges of reflecting critically on research relationships that are complex, emotional and underpinned by differing needs and priorities.
0004-0894
Wilkins, Annabelle
33b0bf25-91c4-4160-8e1c-38d397a17565
Wilkins, Annabelle
33b0bf25-91c4-4160-8e1c-38d397a17565

Wilkins, Annabelle (2018) The ethics of collaboration with museums: researching, archiving and displaying home and migration. Area. (doi:10.1111/area.12415).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Collaboration has become an increasingly important aspect of higher education policy agendas in which impact and public engagement are regarded as crucial elements of publicly funded research. Collaborative research raises ethical issues relating to the collection, archiving and dissemination of data, but also in regard to the complex and emotional nature of relationships between participants, practitioners and academics, that are currently under‐explored. This paper examines ethical considerations raised by collaborative research with museums, drawing on doctoral research conducted in collaboration with the Geffrye Museum that examined home, work and migration among Vietnamese communities in East London. The paper examines the challenge of balancing the interests of participants with the museum's aim to document and display testimonies and images of participants’ homes. It explores the ambivalent response of participants to the archiving of their research at the museum. I examine my positionality as a researcher, reflecting on the emotions involved in collaborative research. The paper identifies contributions from museum studies that account for the multiple viewpoints involved in collaboration. In the conclusion, I suggest that the ethical issues in collaboration speak to wider challenges of reflecting critically on research relationships that are complex, emotional and underpinned by differing needs and priorities.

Text
AREA-EF-Jun-2017-0066 The ethics of collaboration with museums researching, archiving and displaying home and migration R2 - Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 15 November 2017
e-pub ahead of print date: 12 March 2018

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 416057
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/416057
ISSN: 0004-0894
PURE UUID: 108df8f5-6e5f-4f00-85c5-777a2197bf5f
ORCID for Annabelle Wilkins: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-4235-9719

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Date deposited: 01 Dec 2017 17:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 05:59

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Author: Annabelle Wilkins ORCID iD

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