Special Issue of Museum & Society: Mobilizing Museum Minerals
From the Museu de Ciência e Técnica da Escola de Minas (Brazil) to the Smithsonian Institution (USA) and the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (Austria), many encyclopedic and natural history museums are known for their significant collections of mineral specimens. Stored in early cabinets of curiosities where gems and precious stones spoke to a collector’s wealth and travels, these collections now mark natural history galleries in museums around the globe which represent rich sites of scientific research and public engagement. Despite their continuing popularity, however, mineral collections are relatively absent in critical museum scholarship, especially decolonial or environmental museology.
This special issue of Museum & Society showcases burgeoning critical approaches to the collection, interpretation, and display of mineralogical specimens in museums while expanding understandings of their transformative potential in an era of rising ecological injustice. Ranging from conceptual explorations of mineral cataloguing to reflections on reclaimed biocultural heritage, the papers gathered in this collection suggest productive pathways for scholars and practitioners to attend to the social, political, and environmental qualities of museum minerals.
Editorial: Mobilizing Museum Minerals
Eleanor S. Armstrong and Camille-Mary Sharp
Cataloguing Minerals, part 1: Historical Cataloguing Practices and the Logics of Colonialism
Selby Hearth, Carrie Robbins et al.
Cataloguing Minerals, part 2: Re-imagining Mineral Catalogue Descriptions to Address Colonial Legacies
Carrie Robbins, Selby Hearth et al.
Invisible Labour in the Woodwardian Collection
Joshua Hillman
Objects of Politics: The Appropriation of Earth Science Collections in Prussia during the Long Nineteenth Century
Angela Strauß
Diamonds and Emotions in the Minerals Gallery: Civilizing Emodities in the Age of Liberal Empire
Danielle Kinsey
Exhibiting Settler Geology: The Geological Survey of Canada’s 19th Century Mineral Collections
Laura Pannekoek
Crown Fossils: Extractive Museums, Authorized Narratives, Institutional Critique, and the Artist-as-Museologist
Frédéric Bigras-Burrogano, Jordan B. Kinder
Retrospective Thinking: Decolonizing Minerals at National Museums Scotland
Georgina Grant, Ellie Swinbank
Examining the Colonial Legacies of the Hunterian’s Mineralogical and Petrological Collection: New Perspectives on Geoscience Collections
Erika B Anderson
Industrial Imperialism and the Museum: A Coal Biography
Anaïs Walsdorf
Darwin’s Chalcopyrite: Engaging Museum Audiences with Global Extractive Stories
Liz Hide
Exhibiting the Extractive: Bitumen in Fort McMurray
Elysia French
Decolonial Museology, Space Travel and the Mineral Cabinet
Alana Osbourne
Reinterpreting the Mineral Collections in Rome’s Museum of Civilizations
Silvia Pireddu
‘Whose Gold Is This?’ The Gold of the Dutch Golden Coach
Annemarie de Wildt
Object Biography of a Series of Radioactive Drill Cores from Shinkolobwe, Democratic Republic of Congo
Livia Cahn
Memory’s Seams: Scarcity and Preciousness in Earth Pigments
Eugenia Kisin
