Buchczyk, M and Fonck, M and Usón, TJ and Palaić, T (Eds).
(2025)
Unearthing Collections: Archives, time and ethics.
[Book].
UCL Press: London, UK.
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Abstract
Unearthing Collections invites readers to reconsider the ethics of collections and archives through the lens of temporality. Drawing on case studies that range from community protests over glacial sampling to the ethical dilemmas of housing human remains in museum collections and acquiring ephemeral political art, the authors interrogate the urgent challenges of collecting, displaying and preserving traces. The book is framed around the concept of ‘unearthing’, the process of revealing hidden truths, excavating layers of history, and uncovering the unknown. It explores how the pursuit of knowledge often comes at the cost of displacement, exploitation, commodification, and the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Alongside critique of the extractive practices that shaped many collections and archives, the book proposes a shift towards ‘re-earthing’, a practice that reconfigures how we understand and engage with knowledge about traces. As a critical approach, re-earthing acknowledges the messy, entangled nature of traces of the past, rejecting attempts to purify or control them in collections and archives, so they may evolve into new forms of knowledge. This innovative perspective challenges scholars, archivists, artists, and collection practitioners to rethink their approach to time and trace, urging them to disrupt dominant chronologies and cultivate new ethical approaches for working with collections and archives.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Unearthing Collections: Archives, time and ethics |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800089501 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800089501 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089501 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Collection © Editors, 2025 Text © Contributors, 2025 Any third- party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third- party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. If you would like to reuse any third- party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Buchczyk, M., Fonck, M., Usón, T.J. and Palaić, T. (eds). 2025. Unearthing Collections: Archives, time and ethics. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089501 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | unearthing, re-earthing, temporality, ethics, deep time |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217332 |
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