Sharon Macdonald

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, a BMBF-funded Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, is pleased to invite applications on the topic of Addressing Heritage Loss for its 2026-7 fellowship programme. This opportunity is open to both experienced and early-career postdoctoral researchers, as wel...

This article develops the concept of populist truth-making as a device to study the effects of populist politics on museums in Europe. Despite a growing interest in the (mis)uses of the past by populist politics in heritage and memory studies, our understanding of how populist politics affect museums and other heritage institutions is still limited...

Germany’s memoryscape is transforming. Long structured by a focus on the Nazi past and the Holocaust, in which other memories tended to be marginalized out of concern that they might relativize this terrible history, it is increasingly incorporating – and being changed by – other strands of collective remembrance. In particular, Germany’s socialist...

This essay introduces the 89 th issue of Berliner Blätter entitled Germany's Changing Memoryscape. Postsocialist, Postmigrant, and Postcolonial Dynamics. The introduction , as well as the issue as a whole, is dedicated to how German remembrance is being transformed by various posts, first and foremost those invoked in the title. It argues that whil...

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg | Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, based at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, invites applications from both experienced and early career post-doc researchers for fellowships to begin in October 2025. The application deadline is 29 April 2024. Applications for fellowships for 2025-6 should a...

A pressing global challenge is to find ways of dealing with the past that can help in crafting more equitable and liveable futures. This chapter is concerned with the perspectives that anthropologists can bring to this, and with how anthropologists’ active and practical involvement in heritage-making can allow for engaging with other perspectives,...

Series of four lectures on the philosophy and practice of heritage, drawing on original collaborative research projects. The lectures will be held at Tsinghua University, Beijing

What kind of museum do we need to help ensure that there is a future? In these times of climate catastrophe, as well as multiple political, social and viral threats, this is, surely, the question that needs to be posed. Doing so leads inexorably to the question how such a museum might act and be – in, of, and especially for, the future, or for poss...

Holocaust Memorial Day was first held in Britain on 27 January 2001, the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This chapter addresses the question of why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a state-sponsored commemoration should be initiated of an event which took place over half a century ago and outside Britain’s shores. The...

This article is concerned with the relationship between the things in museum shops and the things in museums. It explores this through the notion of 'economies', attending to the symbolic as well as financial dimensions of these.

This article considers the implications of using ethnological collections in the making of a national museum. It focuses on the case of the recently opened Ethnological Museum within the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, Germany, about which there has been much public debate and criticism, including about Germany's own colonialism. Through an analysis of the...

The museum and heritage sector has been shaken by debates over how to address colonialism, migration, Islamophobia, LGBTI+ and multiple other forms of difference. This major multi-researcher ethnography of museums and heritage in Berlin provides new insight into how ›diversity‹ is understood and put into action in museums and heritage. Exploring ne...

in recent years there has been a proliferation of additional ethics codification, emanating from a wide array of organisations, including research councils and governments. a key difference from the codes of professional organisations is that these are generally to be implemented at institutional (i.e. university) level, which has led many universi...

The museum and heritage sector has been shaken by debates over how to address colonialism, migration, Islamophobia, LGBTI+ and multiple other forms of difference. This major multi-researcher ethnography of museums and heritage in Berlin provides new insight into how ›diversity‹ is understood and put into action in museums and heritage. Exploring ne...

The museum and heritage sector has been shaken by debates over how to address colonialism, migration, Islamophobia, LGBTI+ and multiple other forms of difference. This major multi-researcher ethnography of museums and heritage in Berlin provides new insight into how ›diversity‹ is understood and put into action in museums and heritage. Exploring ne...

The museum and heritage sector has been shaken by debates over how to address colonialism, migration, Islamophobia, LGBTI+ and multiple other forms of difference. This major multi-researcher ethnography of museums and heritage in Berlin provides new insight into how ›diversity‹ is understood and put into action in museums and heritage. Exploring ne...

The museum and heritage sector has been shaken by debates over how to address colonialism, migration, Islamophobia, LGBTI+ and multiple other forms of difference. This major multi-researcher ethnography of museums and heritage in Berlin provides new insight into how ›diversity‹ is understood and put into action in museums and heritage. Exploring ne...

The museum and heritage sector has been shaken by debates over how to address colonialism, migration, Islamophobia, LGBTI+ and multiple other forms of difference. This major multi-researcher ethnography of museums and heritage in Berlin provides new insight into how ›diversity‹ is understood and put into action in museums and heritage. Exploring ne...

The museum and heritage sector has been shaken by debates over how to address colonialism, migration, Islamophobia, LGBTI+ and multiple other forms of difference. This major multi-researcher ethnography of museums and heritage in Berlin provides new insight into how ›diversity‹ is understood and put into action in museums and heritage. Exploring ne...

This chapter explores the effects and ethics of immersion in what it calls dangerous pasts. These are pasts, which, while widely and generally negatively evaluated in contemporary society, are nevertheless – in part at least – glorified or viewed nostalgically by some. Through a discussion of examples of immersive heritage experiences about World W...

Museums are full of objects that are surely, by definition, not rubbish. The role of museums in society is to select certain things and to look after them for the future. Museums – or, more precisely, certain members of their staff – thus identify and conserve what is, at any particular time and place, considered as having worth and value. Their co...

This paper provides an overview of the DFG-funded research project Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Museum and Heritage Contexts, part of the DFG Priority Program The Digital Image. First, we outline the project’s theoretical grounding in affordance theories and its attention to practices of...

Islam and Heritage in Europe provides a critical investigation of the role of Islam in Europe’s heritage. Focusing on Islam, heritage and Europe, it seeks to productively trouble all of these terms and throw new light on the relationships between them in various urban, national and transnational contexts. Bringing together international scholars fr...

This chapter addresses the potentials and challenges of new participatory approaches in museums and heritage as they relate to Islam and Muslims in Europe. To do so, it draws on notions of framing and examines a number of significant participatory initiatives. These are Urban Islam (opened 2003) at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; TAMAM (launched 2016)...

1970 erschien »Das Museum der Zukunft. 43 Beiträge zur Diskussion über die Zukunft des Museums« mit Vorstellungen zur erwarteten und erwünschten Entwicklung dieser Institution. 50 Jahre danach ist es Zeit für eine Revision: 43 neue Beiträge internationaler Autor*innen aus der Museumspraxis verschiedener Sparten, aus Theorie, Vermittlung, Kunst und...

This article addresses the question of how to go beyond the conceptualisation of museums as islands in museum ethnography without losing the ethnographic depth and insights that such research can provide. Discussing existing ethnographic research in museums, the ethnographic turn in organization studies, and methodological innovation that seeks to...

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researcher...

A key – some might even say _the _key – curatorial role is to decide what to collect. What, that is, should be preserved for the future? In this essay, we present ethnographic research with curators of contemporary everyday life. As we show, these curators struggle with a profusion of things, stories and information that could potentially be collec...

What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions, and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia,’ whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which ca...

Profusion is one of four themes in the Heritage Futures research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The term, Profusion, was chosen as one that communicates that there is a lot of something, without implying whether that is a good or a bad thing. Within the Heritage Futures project, Profusion is investigated within househo...

This article focuses on curators’ frustrations with (what we call) ‘the profusion struggle’. Curators express the difficulty of collecting the material culture of everyday life when faced with vast existing collections. They explain that these were assembled, partly, from anxiety to gather up what was anticipated at risk of being lost. Unlimited ac...

In 1945, Nuremberg’s heritage and image lay in ruin. Most of its famous mediaeval Old Town had been destroyed by bombing and the city had come to be seen as a, or even the, Nazi city. The city faced the task of rebuilding itself, its present and future, and also, in a thoroughly entangled undertaking, its heritage. © 2019 selection and editorial ma...

Heritage has emerged as a key area of contemporary anthropological concern, with debates previously framed in terms of culture and tradition now being discussed as heritage. The rise of anthropological interest in heritage is a response to the configuration of culture and cultural debate in terms of heritage and to an anthropological turn within he...

This article addresses the question of how to go beyond the conceptualisation of museums as islands in museum ethnography without losing the ethnographic depth and insights that such research can provide. Discussing existing ethnographic research in museums, the ethnographic turn in organization studies, and methodological innovation that seeks to...

Questions of significance are of perennial, inevitable relevance to museums. Indeed, one could, with Gott- fried Korff, say that museums themselves are among the “meaning agencies of modernity” – the “Sinnagenturen der Moderne”.1 They engage in what in German is called ‘Sinnstiften’ or to endow with meaning. This is not just about specific meanings...

This is a conversation in which Sharon Macdonald reflects upon ethnographic research conducted in museums in Europe. This is not restricted to ethnographic research on ethnographic museums, though the relationship between ethnography and such museums is also discussed.

This chapter is written in response to ‘The Quest for Generic Ethics Principles in Social Science Research’ by David Carpenter. It is also based on a response given at a workshop organised by the Academy of Social Sciences in March 2013 to help to formulate some generic ethics principles for social sciences. From an anthropologist’s perspective I a...

How to deal with the legacies of colonial and other problematic pasts is a challenge shared by most museums of ethnography and ethnology. In this introduction to the following special section on the same topic, the section editors provide an over- view and analysis of the burdens and potentials of the past in such museums. ey set out di erent strat...

Heritage Futures is a four-year collaborative international research programme (2015–2019) funded by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ‘Care for the Future’ Theme Large Grant, and supported additionally by its host universities and partner organisations. The research programme involves ambitious interdisciplinary research to explore...

Referenda can be sad affairs. This time last year, I was in Greece discussing with friends their referendum. It was a difficult visit with many painful conversations. Most were about what the EU meant, what might Grexit have meant, and the way material security was rapidly vanishing: having a decent salary, a job, money in the bank, valuables in ba...

No abstract is available for this article.

This article addresses some of the recent, ongoing, and planned reconfigurations of museums in Europe in light of their implications for the making of cultural difference, diversity, and citizenship. It argues that these are configured not only through the internal content of particular museums but also through divisions of classificatory labor and...

Features short commentaries by Michal, Buchowski, Benoit de 'Estoile, Christina Toren, Vesna Vučinić Nešković, Niko Besnier, Jasna Čapo Žmegač (CRO), Sharon MacDonald, Marie-Claire Foblets.

No abstract is available for this article.

This article discusses ‘difficult heritage’ as the phenomenon of nations or other collectives publicly signaling and commemorating past atrocities that they committed and for which they are ashamed. Through a focus on public commemoration and heritage of World War II in Europe, it shows that there has long been reluctance to acknowledge such potent...

Bringing together an international forum of experts, this book looks at how museums, libraries and further public cultural institutions respond to the effects of globalisation, mobility and migration across Europe. It puts forward examples of innovative practice and policies that reflect these challenges, looking at issues such as how cultural ins...

Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a ’memoryland’ – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is related to the changing natu...

Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a 'memoryland' - littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this 'memory phenomenon' is related to the changing natu...