The ethics of collaboration with museums: Researching, archiving and displaying home and migration

Collaboration has become an increasingly important aspect of higher education policy agendas in which impact and public engagement are regarded as crucial elements of publicly funded research. Collaborative research raises ethical issues relating to the collection, archiving and dissemination of data, but also in regard to the complex and emotional nature of relationships between participants, practitioners and academics, that are currently under‐explored. This paper examines ethical considerations raised by collaborative research with museums, drawing on doctoral research conducted in collaboration with the Geffrye Museum that examined home, work and migration among Vietnamese communities in East London. The paper examines the challenge of balancing the interests of participants with the museum's aim to document and display testimonies and images of participants’ homes. It explores the ambivalent response of participants to the archiving of their research at the museum. I examine my positionality as a researcher, reflecting on the emotions involved in collaborative research. The paper identifies contributions from museum studies that account for the multiple viewpoints involved in collaboration. In the conclusion, I suggest that the ethical issues in collaboration speak to wider challenges of reflecting critically on research relationships that are complex, emotional and underpinned by differing needs and priorities.