Museum Work as Protection Beyond the Human: Co-Curating Possibility at the Intersection of COVID-19, Race, and Environment

How can museum collections foster practices of mutual protection beyond the human? This article considers insights from the creation of the Field Museum’s Pandemic Collection: a project to record the intersections of COVID-19, race, and environment. The collection takes as foundational the inseparability of social justice and environmental protection work and draws on long-standing research partnerships with communities living in and caring for peri-urban ecologies shaped by the ongoing aftermath of extractive economies (including the Northwest Amazon and Chicago). The methodology informing this archive seeks to integrate community partners’ historical critiques, creative forms of mutual aid, and emerging practices of more-than-human protection. The Pandemic Collection aims to take seriously the full spectrum of partners’ ethical commitments—to one another, to home ecologies, and to complex multispecies networks of mutual care and protection. The project explores possibilities for museum praxis that refl ect the intersecting vulnerabilities of racialized communities surviving the COVID-19 pandemic in postextractive ecologies and their expansive strategies of mutual protection. Approaching co-curation as a “care-full” relation of mutual accompaniment requires attention to the racialized structuring of vulnerabilities for partner communities and their home ecologies and the potential for public-serving collections work to support emergent relations of multispecies protection.