Dr. Janet Monge (right) and Penn undergraduate student Jane Weiss in CAAM 190 Classroom at the Penn Museum, discussing the remains of Katricia Dotson, who was murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing (on the right, on the table, in front of Monge) from Week 1 video in Princeton Coursera Course "REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology" (remains not blurred in the original). Courtesy of the author.

Dr. Janet Monge (right) and Penn undergraduate student Jane Weiss in CAAM 190 Classroom at the Penn Museum, discussing the remains of Katricia Dotson, who was murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing (on the right, on the table, in front of Monge) from Week 1 video in Princeton Coursera Course "REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology" (remains not blurred in the original). Courtesy of the author.

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This article examines how openly sharing data online can continue the dehumanizing work of 19th century “collectors” who stole the bodies of colonized peoples. It addresses the ongoing controversies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (“Penn Museum“), regarding the interlinked weaponization of over one thousand...

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Context 1
... three small, fragmentary bones in front of Monge are part of Katricia's right thigh (femur), right hip (innominate), and part of the left pubic bone (pubic symphysis). 25 While they discuss the bones of a murdered Black child, the two white women literally stand in the center of a triangle of racialized human remains -on the examination table in front of them and also in two walls of glass-fronted cabinets full of Morton's stolen skulls behind them ( Figure 2). As their visual arrangement in the Coursera video suggests, these two sets of remains -the bones of the MOVE children murdered in 1985 and the crania in Morton's nineteenth-century collection -are directly linked in ways that can help us to see how white scientists extract data from the remains of the Black and brown dead in order to support their interests. ...
Context 2
... Dotson and Delisha Africa were not the first criminalized Black Philadelphians to have parts of their bodies collected by the Penn Museum. A number of the skulls that lined the walls of the classroom in which Monge filmed her Coursera video ( Figure 2) were also unofficial gifts of the City of Philadelphia to white scientists. 57 . ...
Context 3
... of these Indian crania -nameless but for another physician at the Philadelphia almshouse, Joseph Carson, who brought them back from India -hover above the right shoulder of the white student, Jane Weiss, in the widely published stills from the Coursera 68 video, exposed in their own degradation even as they witness the consequences of nearly 200 years of Morton's numericized racial hatred (Figure 2). 72 Like Katricia's bones, their skulls have been rendered anonymous by science, removed from the contexts of their lives and families to become the research tools of empire. ...

Citations

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