I was invited by Cindy Zalm (Head of Delivery and Realisation at Wereldmuseum) to present at The European Working Conference on Collections from Colonial Contexts in September, and I thought I would log some of my reflections and the edited text of my talk here.

Cindy and I met a few years ago (online of course) when contributing to Alice Stevenson and Cara Krmpotich’s excellent collection of essays, Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice (UCL Press, 2024). Zalm’s chapter examined how Dutch ethnographic museums have been rethinking their documentation practices through a decolonial lens. Drawing on the eternally useful Words Matter project and the work of Hannah Turner, she traces the historically colonial roots of cataloguing, language biases in classification, and institutional inertia in the ethnographic collections of the Netherlands. Arguing for transparency, multilingual access, and collaborative co-curation with communities, she rightly emphasises that decolonising collections involves not just exhibitions, but deep reform of underlying documentation structures. I mention this in part because it’s a great bit of work, and well worth reading, but also because her chapter explains some of the history of the Dutch set-up in regard to their largest ethnographic collections. My biggest take-away from the conference was less about individual case studies from across Europe and more about the way in which the infrastructure in the Netherlands supports restitution work and acknowledges (unequivocally? seems unlikely) that work on colonial collections is a core national responsibility and needs addressing.

This co-ordinated approach seems to have allowed a very different way of working in areas such as return and restitution, provenance and research, from the fragmented efforts in the UK. On top of the sector working together (and I am under no illusion that “working together” is likely doing some very heavy lifting here) there is concerted government support and backing. I have struggled to understand exactly who does what with the various bodies involved, but I do know the Colonial Collections Consortium held the conference. And the Consortium is…

a partnership between five organisations in the Netherlands: Museum Bronbeek, NIOD, Cultural Heritage Agency, Rijksmuseum and Wereldmuseum. The consortium supports institutions administering collections in provenance research by sharing knowledge, answering questions and providing stakeholders with a network.

So, a slightly different group of heritage organisations including/supported by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, RCE) which is, I think, an advisory body to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). Still with me? I am mainly explaining this for myself. There is also the Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC) which I am pretty sure is the research arm of the Wereldmuseum, also doing really interesting and good work.

TLDR: The Netherlands acknowledges its colonial collections as colonial, seems to take restitution and return seriously, and at a governmental level. This is a good thing and somewhat lacking in the UK.

To return to the conference. The purpose of getting together was described thus:

Many museums and institutions across Europe are custodians of objects and collections originating from colonial contexts. As professionals managing these collections, and recognizing our shared responsibility in addressing historical injustices, how can we best fulfil this role? What can we learn from each other’s experiences?

Initially, I wasn’t sure where my work would fit into this discussion, as the last three years on Transforming Collections the focus was more on contemporary artworks, rather than historical, social or ethnographic collections and indeed many/most of the conference presentations were restitution case studies. However, as Wayne Modest pointed out in a stonking introduction on Day 2, cultural and social infrastructures are still dominated by colonial epistemologies and the work is to keep trying to dismantle that.

There was also a rumbling criticism across the conference and on social media, essentially about how white it was and who was included and not included in the room/discussion. Both Modest and Zalm addressed this, and I understand where they were coming from. Their position was that this conference was about getting “our” (read: European museums with collections that are essentially made up of the spoils of colonialism) houses in order. Wayne Modest asked clearly: What are the responsibilities that we as Europeans have to take for problems we cause? And he went on to say that we need to stop offloading the issues caused and perpetuated in European collections, countries, governments on the countries, governments we previously colonised. I need to think more on whether the conference achieved this – there was a bit of rather patrician “look what we did and how it benefited everyone” in the case studies, but Modest was also very direct in saying that we needed to stop celebrating doing the bare minimum, or even celebrating thinking about doing the bare minimum (I am paraphrasing massively here). There were as always people and presentations who slipped into that behaviour, pleased with their allyship, for attending the conference at all. I never feel “well done us” after this type of event, I mainly feel how much there is still to do and how slowly we do it. However, the general understanding of the issues was palpably different: more progressive, less performative (actual returns have happened) than how these conversations went even 10 years ago. The baseline has shifted, even in the face of a rise in nationalism and the like-mindedness is on the whole more critical and comitted to return than I have heard before.

There is however a deeper issue about integration, representation and who is in the room, and who doing the work. The sector in the UK remains very white at all levels, and this was clearly so across the European museums who presented at the conference. This is not to say that racialised and minoritised curators should be taking on the hard and painful work of addressing colonial legacies throughout our cultural institutions, but that the purview, education and lived experience of most UK and European museum staff remains so very homogenous and limited.

And this point brings me to the absolute highlight of the conference, curator and researcher Heba Abd-el-Gawad’s presentation of her work on the !كل العيون عليها / All Eyes on Her! project at the Horniman Museum where her rejection of the shibboleths of collections management and exhibition display addressed the absence of contemporary Egyptian voices, and especially women, in interpreting Egyptian heritage. Her work is sometimes described as activism and it does feel radical, yet why should the exclusion of contemporary Egyptian voices from interpreting Egyptian heritage in UK museums, an exclusion that reflects a systematic injustice rooted in colonial collecting practices which displaced objects from their cultural contexts and continue to silence their descendants, be accepted as the norm? Is doing better history, writing women back into the stories of their cultural heritage really radical? Read her stuff, see her speak!

I need to think (write) more about the presentations and discussions over the conference. Notable among them, were those on my own panel, in particular Imogen Coulson‘s thoughtful work for the Digital Benin project, especially around the issue of written records for a culture with an oral tradition. Angus Patterson’s Loan construction of Ashanti golden objects to Ghana, in which he got rather a hard time for working creatively, effectively and pragmatically within the limits of ill-thought out UK law, and Taina Máret Pieski’s talk on what happens when you give peoples belongings back to them in a museum for and about them, Empowering the Cultural Self-Esteem of the Sámi People through Community.

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So, to my talk. The panel was called Becoming Transparent, Doing Our Research: Sharing approaches to provenance research and data transparency. Inspired as always by discussions with excellent friends and colleagues, in this case the ever-incisive Tehmina Goskar, I decided to take issue with “transparency”, because we aren’t and we can’t be.

Introduction

Good morning. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this panel today. My own work engages with the ways in which museums record, research, interpret and make accessible collections information, sometimes in specifically colonial contexts, sometimes in contexts shaped by colonialist thinking and in formerly colonial nations – which I think is important to acknowledge. This is of course, not a neutral undertaking, and yet it should be a fundamental one embedded as it is, in histories of violence, appropriation, and ongoing structural inequalities which must be addressed.

Much of what I will reflect on may appear self-evident, but I hope you will bear with me as I restate it: as professionals, we know that provenance research and careful documentation are part of our core responsibilities. In many respects, these obligations are written into our professional standards and guidelines. Yet if the work were truly straightforward, we would not still be rehearsing these questions. The persistence of this conversation suggests that deeper issues remain: questions about what we mean by transparency; why it has not yet been consistently realised; why the research has not been done; and what forms of accountability might move us beyond resistance and centering our own Euro-centric predilections and values towards genuinely inclusive ethical and structural change.

Unpacking Transparency

The session title asks us to reflect on transparency, a term often invoked as a corrective to decades of erasure, silence, and neglect in museum practice. Transparency has been built into professional discourse: one iteration of the ICOM museum definition (2019) stated that museums are “participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities.” Transparency, here, presented as a virtue—a guarantor of trust, equity, and legitimacy. Interestingly it was dropped from the current version of the definition. There is an assumption if we put all our records out there, we are being transparent. I would suggest that claims of transparency around data are not as compelling as they might seem.  Availability is not the same as transparency; publication does not equate to access. We need to be cautious when we make these claims or allow others to make them for us.

Etymologically, transparency suggests that light may shine through, that everything can be revealed. The assumption is that if museums fully disclose what they know and what they have, if all records are opened, then truth and fairness will follow.  I want to question this assumption. Transparency is neither fully possible, nor necessarily desirable. Not all knowledge can, or should, be revealed without context. Not all communities and cultures define openness in the same way. And transparency risks functioning as a distinctly Western epistemological paradigm: a call for exposure that may in fact obscure responsibility by suggesting that mere revelation is sufficient.

From Transparency to Accountability

I propose that accountability, rather than transparency, must guide our work. Accountability implies responsibility: for the past, for the present, and for the decisions we make as institutions and individuals. It asks not only what we disclose, but to whom we answer, and who has the authority to hold us to account.

Accountability means recognising that collections are not abstract “heritage,” but belongings taken, traded, or coerced under colonial conditions. It means acknowledging the claims of originating communities and being willing to act on those claims, including restitution where appropriate and possible. It means recognising that our catalogues, displays, and research practices actively construct narratives and values, and therefore carry consequences.

This shift from transparency to accountability reframes the conversation. Transparency alone risks being performative: a publication of data, an open access database, a gesture of exposure. Accountability demands more: to explain our decisions, to confront their impacts, and to remain open to change when we fall short.

Barriers to Change and Lessons from Case Studies

If accountability is so pressing, why is it not consistently realised? Part of the difficulty lies in institutional inertia. The museum sector is deeply structured by traditions of authority, defensiveness, and a tendency to conflate critique with accusation. Calls for accountability generate paralysis: a cycle of exposure, guilt, denial and inaction.

From the case studies presented on this panel today, we see that accountability requires reflexivity: the willingness to ask, what have we done and why? What are we doing now, and for whom? Who holds us to account? Accountability is not achieved once and for all, it must be continually re-negotiated.

Provisional Semantics

These issues were particularly evident in the Provisional Semantics project, which I worked on in 2020-2022, led by Tate and the Decolonising Arts Institute at UAL. This AHRC-funded project examined how museums and heritage organisations might produce search terms, catalogue entries, and interpretation using more ethical and equitable practices, particularly in relation to the artworks and histories of racialised and minoritised people, and in the context of a (still putative) digitised national collection.

As the project developed, however, our emphasis shifted from practical improvements to deeper structural questions. What happens when we “clean up” data as a supposed solution to problematic cataloguing? Can museums genuinely, equitably, and ethically represent multivocality? Why is embedded change in attitudes and behaviours so hard to achieve, and why is sector guidance so often inadequate for genuine co-production?

We found that tidying up the records and revising terminology, while necessary, risked being superficial unless they were accompanied by accountability for the systems, conventions, and colonial logics that underpin cataloguing itself. Provisional Semantics showed that transparency in the form of revised records is not enough; accountability for infrastructure and practice must be at the centre of policy procedures and our research.

Knowledge Production, Ethics, and Epistemic Injustice

Museums are not, and have never been, neutral spaces. They are sites of knowledge production where decisions about what to collect, how to classify, and how to interpret, shape what becomes visible, valuable, and authoritative. Every entry in a catalogue, every label in a gallery, every choice of terminology contributes to the construction of narratives that privilege some voices while silencing others.

In this sense, museums are centrally implicated in epistemic injustice: the systematic exclusion of certain people or communities from participation in knowledge production.

Colonial collections exemplify this. European languages, taxonomies, and disciplinary frameworks have historically been privileged, while the voices and perspectives of source communities have been erased or marginalised.

This challenge is not only historical. As we embrace digital systems and machine learning tools to manage data, biases are amplified and misinformation codified. Algorithms reproduce exclusions embedded in past cataloguing practices. Categories hardened in databases may reinforce colonial frameworks rather than dismantle them.

A further example comes from a report I produced with colleagues across the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme in the UK. This initiative sought to unite cultural heritage collections through ambitious digital projects. Yet early in its life, we identified a gap: while projects were exploring innovative uses of digital technologies, they lacked structured support for addressing ethical challenges. So in the rush for data, innovation and transparency, the people, planet and relationships seem to have been overlooked.

Together with colleagues, I convened a workshop to explore these concerns. What emerged was a shared recognition that ethics needed to be built into practice, not bolted on afterwards. Our report outlined five core values: put people first, be transparent (!! later revised to accountable), consider context, invest in legacy, and care for climate. We also made recommendations for embedding ethics in programme and project design, funding allocation, and infrastructural planning from the outset.

What this experience underscored for me is that accountability in knowledge production requires values-based frameworks. Cataloguing, research, digitisation, and AI development are never simply impartial acts of data management. They have human, social and political consequences. By foregrounding ethics in and as practice, The Ethics in Practice report illustrated how accountability extends beyond the museum sector into the infrastructures and policies that shape cultural heritage research more broadly.

Restitution and Ethics
Restitution is perhaps the most tangible expression of accountability, compelling us to confront the ethical responsibilities that come with holding collections acquired in colonial contexts. As everyone here well knows, and as we have heard in some of the case studies presented already today, as well as those to come, restitution is fundamentally about repairing relationships, redressing harms, and recognising rightful ownership. It is not merely a logistical or legal question, but a moral and ethical one.

My own work centres on knowledge production, capture, and dissemination, areas that raise pressing questions about what restitution means in a digital age. Recently, I had the privilege of collaborating with an international team (including Andrea Wallace, Anne Luther, SD Lulz, Kelly Foster, Janice Cheddie and Severine Dusollier) to reframe restitution debates in the context of digital transformation. Traditional law and policy reforms have largely focused on tangible cultural property, yet museums increasingly hold vast quantities of analogue and digital material, along with associated rights and knowledge. These epistemic assets are deeply intertwined with cultural and intellectual property, and their ethical management is essential in a digital and AI-driven heritage landscape. This expanding framework—what we term digital restitution—extends the principles of object restitution to the stewardship, access, and ethical use of knowledge and digital assets.  The article is called “Reorienting Restitution: Accounting for Epistemically Assets as Entangled with Cultural and Intellectual Property in a Digital Age”. [currently under review so I will update with a link when published]

If we ignore these assets, digitisation and the datafication of objects, artefacts, belongings risks producing new forms of neocolonial dispossession. Knowledge and cultural materials may be fragmented by property regimes, repurposed without consent, and used to extract wealth and value in ways that extend colonial dynamics. We have argued that restitution must expand to include epistemic assets so that communities can reclaim not only objects, but also the resources, research and knowledge needed for genuine self-determination.

We need to recognise that restitution is not only about objects on display in European museums, but also about digital records, data infrastructures, and the rights and relationships that flow from them. Accountability in this context requires us to confront the entanglement of restitution with intellectual property regimes, digitisation policies, and the accelerating use of AI.

Conclusion

Transparency alone is insufficient as a guiding principle. While it has been mobilised as a corrective to past erasures, it risks becoming a hollow gesture, an act of exposure without responsibility. Accountability demands responsibility for decisions, responsiveness to communities, which we would all acknowledge, but also an openness to fundamental structural change and offers a more ethical framework.

Museums are, and always have been, sites of contested knowledge. They shape and respond to the narratives that circulate in society, and therefore they bear responsibility for whose voices are included and excluded, whose culture is represented or heard. As we navigate through this complex era of digital infrastructures and artificial intelligence, the risks of unaccountable knowledge production are only magnified, unless we author our decisions, employ languages of origin, and claim our mistakes.

The challenge before us, then, is not simply to be transparent, to offer everything up, and hope for the best, but to show our workings, to answer for our choices and to pursue repair in all its various and complex and contradictory forms. To ensure that provenance research and documentation are not ends in themselves, but part of a broader commitment to justice, ethics, and equitable knowledge production. That accounts that give the original context are given by the people who understand that context and are given at least equal billing with the Western interpretations, myths and assumptions. These insights and experiences are not add-ons. If we take accountability seriously: towards communities of origin, towards the public, and towards history then our work with colonial collections can move beyond the still defensive repetition, pseudo-objectivity and authority of our institutions and begin to enact the responsibility we profess. That, I suggest, is the more urgent task.