My work explores and advances innovations in museum ethics with a particular focus on recognizing the agency of practitioners and of publics to engage with ethical issues. I argue that traditional museum ethics, as embodied by codes of practice, is a rigid approach which, in isolation, is unable to guide museums through the complex, shifting 21st-century ethical terrain. I posit that ethics undergirds all areas of museum work including how and whose cultures are valued, the balance between preservation and public access and the role of both the state and public opinion in these activities.

I redefine museum ethics as both a discourse and a practice emerging from convergences among case studies, values/ principles and living, breathing ethics codes. At a time when culture wars and Covid-19 have put the future of museums in many parts of the world in jeopardy, this research introduces to museums new dynamic concepts of ethics responsive to the concerns of civil society.

Museum ethics informs the concept of relational curating at the centre of my new anthology, co-edited with Oscar Ho, Curating Art www.routledge.pub/Curating-Art, London: Routledge, 2022. Leicester Readers in Museum Studies Series.