Short Abstract:

Natural history collections are confronted with questions of colonial pasts, ownership, conservation and preservation. The roundtable will address these questions from environmental humanities perspectives to re-imagine collections as sites of entanglement and disruption across species and bodies.

Long Abstract:

Collection Ecologies intersects environmental history and the history of natural historical and medical collections to open up disciplinary boundaries and reassess the value, the stabilization, transfer, loss, and transformational potential of bio-cultural collections and related sciences to create new transdisciplinary methodologies. The roundtable will consider questions such as: How are museums and affiliated large-scale infrastructures re-imagining and configuring environments – virtually, digitally, and physically – and how does this operation contribute to obscure or make

transparent the vitally important biological and societal information they hold? What tensions arise from collecting, displaying, and reconstructing natural things that have shaped and continued to shape environments? How can we think together about the ways in which material-based ideas and practices intertwine and impact different spheres of knowledge in times of environmental change?

In recent years, provenance research has gained public attention as western institutions confront questions of ownership, custody, and responsibility. However, the productive potential of environmental humanities research in this area has not yet been fully realized, especially in relation to how natural history collections function as sites of entanglement and disruption across continents, species, societies, landscapes, and bodies. We propose Collection Ecologies as a space to understand collections as environments, encompassing both the materiality of specimens and the knowledge extracted from them and to deal critically with presupposed concepts, imaginaries, and visual narratives of “nature.”

Collection Ecologies showcases the productive intersections between objects and environments in the (social) ecologies of collecting, collections as multispecies ecologies, digital environments and colonial ecologies.