‘It Couldn’t be Helped’: Collecting the Challenges of Our Age (Post-print)

This is developed from a paper given at the 50th Museum Ethnographers Group conference held in April 2025 on the theme ‘Help! Care and Support in Museums: Colleagues, Communities, and Collections’. As curator of modern and contemporary history at National Museums Scotland, I consider how the Museum has employed contemporary collecting fieldwork to document continuity, change and contiguity, to tell stories from national, regional and local perspectives. Inspired by the idea of the post-modern museum (Davis 1999: 27), I then propose that there are meaningful opportunities to employ participatory practice as part of our methodologies to document multiple histories ‘in all manner of becomings’ (Deleuze and Guatarri, 2013: 22). I will reflect on case studies relating to two major challenges which characterise our age: migration and the climate crisis.