Sean Mallon's scientific contributions

... Collaboration with indigenous communities, like the issue of colonial heritage in general, has been a challenging issue in museums, but today many changes have taken place and are still being made in this area. According to Candace S. Greene (2015), Nicholas Thomas (2020) and other museum anthropologists, nowadays the inclusion of the "native voice" in exhibits and collections management has become routine, and co-curation is a rather common practice. Thomas considers that the issue of the decolonization of knowledge, which became relevant in the 1980s and 1990s, is now becoming obsolete, as curators have changed and by now, "increasing numbers of curators and museum professionals are, anyway, of indigenous descent." ...

... The present volume distinguishes itself by focusing on the curatorial as a particular practice/method and analytical/conceptual lens through which the relationship between the built environment, (post-)socialist ideologies and the formations and contestations of identity and memory is enacted and can be studied. In doing so, the book draws on work on curatorship (Schorch/McCarthy 2019;Saxer/Schorch 2020;Schorch et al. 2020) to develop it further beyond its museological manifestations -encapsulated in alleged broad trends such as "the era of the curator" (Brenson 2001), "curationism" (Balzar 2015) and the "curatorial turn" (O'Neill 2007) -towards its deployment for the interrogation of (post-)socialist urbanities, materials and visuals. 9 Last but not least, the book is genuinely interdisciplinary by pulling together disciplinary perspectives from anthropology, art history and history by university and museum scholars as well as students with shorter chapters, written in either English or German, through the common lens of curating (post-)socialist environments. ...