Museum practice has increasingly and urgently called for engagement with [source] communities in areas as diverse as exhibition production, collections research, public programming, and policy making. For whom are these collaborations or engagements necessary and/or fruitful? How do we judge when, and if, such collaborations are successful? How do museums and individual curators negotiate a responsible position for the museum as a platform for the interests of source communities?
As a point of wider comparison, this discussion will also address the challenges that different articulations of colonialism, such as settler colonialism compared to European expansionism, bring to community-based curatorial practices. In this way, we may ask why the different patterns of erasure, visibility, violence, and value that shape ethnographic museum collections necessitate different types of intervention with diverse audiences.