Bioethics in and of the Archive

Spanning global contexts from eighteenth-century Caribbean collections to contemporary museum and digital archives, this book rethinks how archives shape understanding of human bodies and interrogates the ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges of working with records of embodied lives.

Grounded in the innovative framework of “VariAbility,” the book moves beyond traditional Disability Studies to foreground lived experience and embodied diversity as analytical tools. Essays explore powerful case studies including the afterlives of Saartjie Baartman, colonial-era human skulls, medical records of children, genetic testing as self-archiving, and the digitization decisions shaping future scholarship. Methodologically, the collection bridges history, bioethics, anthropology, heritage studies, and archival practice, offering new approaches to reading archives as sites of encounter, responsibility, and negotiation. It highlights pressing ethical debates around consent, representation, and access in an age of expanding digital archives. The volume also features interviews with archival practitioners and users, emphasizing the varied ways in which archives can be “read.”

Ideal for undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, and non-specialist readers alike, this volume serves as a groundbreaking “collision space” for rethinking archives and bodies, inviting readers to engage critically with the human stories preserved, transformed, and contested within them.