UK museums task staff with identifying 'stolen' colonial collections

Title: UK museums task staff with identifying 'stolen' colonial collections
Author: Hannah Furness
Media Outlet: The Telegraph
Publish Date: January 1, 2019

“Britain’s leading museums are employing full-time staff to revisit their colonial-era collections, in a bid to acknowledge the controversies of where they came from.

(…) “The V&A has “strengthened its commitment to provenance research”, a spokesman said, recently appointing a dedicated “Provenance and Spoliation Research Curator”, to look into the origins of the Gilbert Collection, made up of gold and silver, enamel miniatures, gold boxes and mosaics amassed through the 20th century, and coordinate the museum’s overall re-examination of where objects came from.”

(…) Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is advertising for a research assistant to manage a labelling project, to “identify and find ways to redress a range of ethical issues in the current displays”.

Paid between £32,236 and £39,609, the successful candidate will “tackle a complex problem around historical labelling and language-use in the much-loved and criticised Pitt Rivers Museum”, with the aim to “dissect and dismantle some of the complex contested words, stereotypes and concepts that are present not only in museums but in society at large”.”