Autumn 2025

Issue 24 is particularly interested in research practices, and asks important questions about how the research performed by museums might best be decolonial, safe, and ethical.

Karen Baker and Mike Esbester discuss the collaborative research conducted through the Railway Work, Life & Death project, highlighting the way collaborative research working across disparate resources (personal histories, railway records, and more) can support discovery in the context of challenging social history. Laura Humphreys presents an article on the repatriation of human remains from museum collections, focussing on the story of Preben Larsen, a Danish resistance fighter during the Holocaust, and how his remains were identified and returned for burial. Hartman Deetz and Milly Mulcahey-Knight write about the crucial discoveries that can be supported by involving Indigenous researchers and practitioners with museum collections, through an object discussion of an Ojibwe-designed birchbark canoe in the Science Museum collections.

The Autumn issue also explores the opportunities for research insights presented by important museum anniversaries in a provocation by Oliver Betts, as well as the potential of wonder to support audience learning and discovery in open store collections as discussed by Yuen Ting Yiu. Simon Werrett reflects on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump and the issue is rounded off by three book reviews by Siobhan Armstrong, Miquel Carandell Baruzzi, and Thomas Mougey.