Opinion
Letters
Trust status is terrifying but totally worth it I would like to respond to comments by Maurice Davies in the article about the downsides of transferring to trust status from local authority governance. At a Renaissance West Midlands funded training course I attended recently a group of museum professionals concluded that working for a local …
Jewish museums help the wider community
The Jewish Museum, London, recently hosted the annual Association European of Jewish Museums (AEJM) conference, bringing together 100 Jewish museum professionals from 53 institutions around the world. It opened with a keynote speech by cultural commentator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on why Jewish museums matter. This set me thinking again about the role of Jewish museums, both …
No pain, no gain
Last year, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF) published a report entitled Whose Cake Is It Anyway? by Bernadette Lynch. Its conclusion raised concerns about a tendency for participation work in UK museums and galleries to be short-term, not embedded, and what Lynch calls “empowerment-lite”. To address the issues raised by the report, PHF has launched …
Letters
The contributions made by human remains Sorcha Ní Fóghlúda’s letter recommending the disposal of the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the “Irish Giant” is a welcome contribution to the discussion on these important human remains: some clarifications may enhance this dialogue. Although it is unlikely he would have chosen to be dissected, there is no direct …
Letters
Return the human remains that are closer to home Following the return of human remains from UK museums to former colonial territories such as Australia, North America and most recently the Torres Strait Islands, isn’t it about time that the Royal College of Surgeons of England’s Hunterian Museum in London appropriately disposed of the remains …