Ethics of Contemporary Collecting addresses pressing and pertinent issues around ethical contemporary collecting, reflecting on how practices are evolving or in flux. Across three sections, each containing live sector subjects from the climate crisis to digital collecting to centring communities, this book collates a combination of case studies and in-depth chapters by leading practitioners working in the field. These pieces are instructive and provide practical, transferable examples of how people have approached these challenges. It highlights examples of leading practice in the field and illustrates ethical approaches to contemporary collecting as work in this area progresses and our conversations about it advance. To reflect this ongoing growth, the book closes with an ‘Activations’ section of discussion prompts intended to keep the conversations and progress – on individual, institutional and societal levels – going. Ethics of Contemporary Collecting is an indispensable tool for informing, training and educating the next generation of curators and collection professionals, and inspiring future collecting projects.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; About the Editors; List of Images and Tables; Section I: Collecting a moment: 1.0 Collecting a Moment: Introduction; 1.1 Making the Future: Contemporary Collecting at National Museums Northern Ireland; 1.2 How Did We Get Here? A Reflection on Collaborative Research in Action; 1.3 Decapitated Monuments to Colonial Administrators of India at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai; 1.4 Antisemitism and Racism: Collections in Transformation; 1.5 Challenges, Risks and Rewards: Contemporary Conflict Collecting at Imperial War Museums; 1.6 The Ethics of Response-ability in Collecting Spontaneous Memorials; 1.7 Mass Observing COVID-19; Section II: Responsible futures: 2.0 Responsible Futures: Introduction; 2.1 Climate Action and Ethics at the Horniman; 2.2 Problem Plastics at the People’s History Museum; 2.3 Minting New Collection Challenges: A Reflective Analysis of the Ethical Dilemmas Around Collecting NFTs; 2.4 New and Emerging Ethical Considerations for Digital Collecting in Museums; 2.5 Collecting as Emergency Response in the Earth Crisis; 2.6 Experience of Non-custodial Collecting through the Contemporary Ecomuseum Model: A Case Study of Taoyuan City Daxi Wood Art Ecomuseum in Taiwan; Section III: Centring communities: 3.0 Centring Communities: Introduction; 3.1 Echoes of Holloway Prison: Collecting Complex Stories; 3.2 Punk Polyvagal in a Polycrisis: Remaking Museums in a Time of Social and Ecological Collapse; 3.3 Collecting Victorian COVID-19 Experiences: Mine, Yours or Ours?; 3.4 What to Take and What to Leave Behind: Contemporary Ethical Collecting for a Museum in Oxford; 3.5 The Power of Patient Perspectives: Exploring Participatory Collecting with Patient Groups in a Medical Museum; 3.6 Critical Reflection on ‘Telling Stories: Experiences of Bereavement During the COVID-19 Pandemic; 3.7 Centring the Donor at the Royal College of Nursing; 3.8 Ethics and Problems of Museumization in the Current Montane Environment Using Examples from the Slovak Republic; Conclusion; Activations and Further Reading; Biographies of the Authors; Index.