This year, the Looting Lab is building on the conversations, findings, and collaborations that stemmed from last year’s intensive working group meetings to develop a clearer research direction and projects. In returning to our research roots, the Lab’s activities are organized around supporting members’ research, disseminating research findings, and developing more concrete contributions to public and academic discourse around looted heritage. To that end, we have developed three research pathways which will orient our activities this year and beyond.
- Taking and Keeping: looting, theft, illicit trade, and subsequent dispossessive arrangements of ownership, access, and control of cultural heritage
- Restitution and Reparation: rematriation, repatriation, return, and other culture-centric forms of reparations and restoration.
- Alternative Approaches: analyses and perspectives on heritage that challenge, unsettle, or disprove existing dominant approaches and discourses, or introduce new epistemologies and conceptual frameworks.
Current Projects
The Looting Lab research team is currently working on the following major projects:
Digital Archive
The digital archive is a record of findings and discussions from the working group meetings held in Year 1 of the Looting Lab. This project critically and imaginatively retraces our steps to record key takeaways, information, and contributions into a digital archive/exhibit which will be made publicly available upon completion to disseminate our findings. We plan to launch the archive by Summer 2026.
Contested Collections Database
This project aims to record the bibliographic information for a large quantity of data related to contested collections to make available to Lab members, and external researchers, upon request. The goal is to form a dynamic digital catalogue that can be shared for research purposes, and to which other researchers contribute their own data, thus reducing the barriers to data access that impede research on contested material. This is an ongoing project, and we hope to have some shareable progress by the end of the academic year.
Featured Member Research
Below are some of the projects our members are currently undertaking. If you are a Looting Lab member and you’d like your work featured here, please email us with details about the project!
Exploring Pathways for Returning Indigenous Knowledges and Materials held by Libraries and Archives
Grant Hurley, Canadiana Librarian, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library