23 Apr 2026  |  Philipp Schorch, Nicholas Thomas & Thiago da Costa Oliveira

Beyond the nature/culture divide: Reimagining human-environment relations in museums

Advocating a cross-disciplinary approach across anthropology, the arts and natural history, the researchers explore three pressing questions:

1) As knowledge-generating institutions, how were museums historically implicated in the conceptual and actual segregation of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ knowledge, and to what extent does this continue to be the case?
2) How can we access materialised human-environment relations conserved in material things, such as Indigenous ‘artefacts’ and ‘specimens’, and generate novel insights across different systems of being and knowing, such as Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies?
3) In what ways can innovative forms of scholarly engagement, curatorship and experimental exhibitions reactivate historical collections as creative technologies, and so promote the re-imagination of human-environmental relations on a larger scale?

This event is part of the research project Beyond the nature/culture devide.