From ‘Specimens’ to Ancestral Remains: Towards Decolonizing the Pathology Museum

Abstract:
In this paper we shine a light on the enduring coloniality of pathology museums. We begin by describing their relationship with state crime and criminal justice in the context of the British empire in and between the metropole and colony and in ways that render them necropoltiical (Mbembe, 2003, 2019) sites. Then, drawing on the data generated from an all-day participatory action zine-making workshop, we highlight how their necropolitical power trickles through the museum encounter itself and beyond to clinical practice. Finally, we consider how their necropoltiical power might be resistantly engaged with through a socially situated reclaiming of life and memory transforming colonial/colonized ‘specimens’ into ancestral human remains.

Bio: 
Dr Kate West is a Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London. Kate is a historian of criminology (nineteenth century bioanthropology, biopsychology, psychiatry and forensics) researching the knowledge and subject production of ‘criminality’, critically understood, and with a particular focus on visual culture. Her research is informed by theoretical perspectives from critical art history, visual culture studies and postcolonial studies.

Her current research has two interrelated strands relating to Empire’s bodily production of criminality. The first relates to broad questions about how coloniality and other axes of power within criminology and criminal justice make body parts, from the genitals to the hand, meaningful within visual culture. The second strand is anatomical, and she is Principal Investigator on the IoPPN-funded research project entitled 'Recurating the Pathological Museum: An Anatomy of Ethical Spectatorship'. The project develops a feminist and postcolonial theoretical and disability studies-informed response to the acquisition, display, and use of human body parts, understood within the broader context of the production and consumption of knowledge about otherness.