ABI Director Andreas Mehler, in his capacity as Director of the Africa Center for Transregional Research at the University of Freiburg (ACT), has acquired a Eucor Seed Money project on “Human Remains in University Collections - Comparison and Entanglements”.
The tri-national university network Eucor - The European Campus is once again supporting cross-border projects with “Seed Money” start-up funding. A total of eight projects from the two funding lines “Teaching” and “Research, Innovation and Transfer” were approved, four of which are headed by the University of Freiburg.
Andreas Mehler, together with colleagues from the Universities of Basel and Strasbourg, forms a research group that deals with ethically sensitive collections of human remains. These collections have global and therefore also colonial origins and present universities across borders with similar challenges when it comes to reassessing and redesigning them.
In recent years, the ABI has carried out extensive preliminary work in this area together with the University of Freiburg, particularly in the context of the DZK-funded project “Provenance Research with a Restitution Perspective: Research Project on the Handling of the Alexander Ecker Collection” (2021-2023).
The outcomes of this research project have been published in
- Policy recommendations for the appropriate handling of collections of human remains using the example of the Alexander Ecker Collection in Freiburg by Wazi Apoh, Reinhart Kössler, Andreas Mehler (D, ENG, FR)
- several video documentaries, for example on the question of “How to identify Human Remains in Anthropological Collections - and how to treat them with respect?” and
- in the blog entry Restitution als Chance zum Dialog zwischen „Zentrum“ und „Peripherie“ by Andreas Mehler and project partner Kokou Azamede