The frameworks underpinning the decision of whether to restitute objects from museums to claimants involves the complex interaction of siloed regimes of value and authority acting across academic and political landscapes. These different understandings of what is at stake when a restitution claim is made are regulated by professionals who have been trained to understand their worldview as the primary or ‘natural’ lens through which to make decisions. Additionally, an insistence on restitution claims being approached on a ‘case by case’ basis ignores the wider powerful regulating normative assumptions underlying decisions and the inherent asymmetries in approaches that are presented as neutral, such as provenance research, stakeholder mapping, legal regimes, valuations, or conservation reports. Charlotte Joy will discuss the research for her upcoming book, drawing on interviews and her work with UNESCO.
Charlotte Joy will discuss her upcoming book on restitution with Mirjam Shatanawi (Amsterdam University of the Arts) and Katarzyna Puzon (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Charlotte Joy is a social anthropologist who specialises in contested heritage and heritage protection. She is a lecturer in Cultural Heritage Management in the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton. She is the author of two books, The Politics of Heritage Management in Mali (Routledge, 2012) and Heritage Justice (CUP, 2020). She chairs UK Blue Shield’s Working Group on the protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage and is a member of UNESCO’s Network of Facilitators of the 2003 Convention.
Mirjam Shatanawi is UNESCO Chair of Museum Collections, Repatriation and Interculturality and Senior Lecturer at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Between 2001 and 2018, she worked as a curator at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Afrika Museum in Nijmegen and the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam. She is the author of Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Collections: The (Un)Making of Indonesian Islam in the Netherlands (Brill, 2024), Islam at the Tropenmuseum (LM Publishers, 2014), Islam in Beeld (SUN, 2008), and co-editor of Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities (Routledge, 2021).
Katarzyna Puzon is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Cultural Techniques, Humboldt University of Berlin. She co-edited Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities (Routledge, 2021) and is completing a book on temporality, heritage, and loss in Beirut. Committed to transdisciplinary research, she has wide-ranging scholarly interests, with a major focus on the anthropology of time, critical heritage perspectives and public makings. Her current research is concerned with the contentious heritage of sound and science and ways of restituting sound.
online, 7 October 2025