Perhaps the most serious challenge facing humanity in 2024 is the climate crisis. Museums are inextricably entwined with this issue, not just through their current advocacy for climate action through exhibitions and programs but also through the lessons that can be gleaned from their collections and how they were and are managed and interpreted. In the past, museums tended to represent the natural world set apart from humans. Natural history museums and anthropology museums were separate institutions, dividing up material culture between them, and managing, curating, cataloging, and displaying objects and specimens in different ways, with the result that connections between the human and nonhuman worlds were overlooked, even in the case of Indigenous people whose ways of being embraced the environment. The Museum of Zoology and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge, for example, are across the street from one another, but, as Jack Ashby points out (Ashby 2024, this volume), “the historic practices of each of their underpinning disciplines have divided their collections and institutional narratives in far more significant ways.”

The special section in this year's issue of Museum Worlds tackles this nature/culture split, presenting articles from a workshop at the MAA in July 2023 that examined museum collections of ethnography and natural history as “archives of environmental knowledge.” Reflecting recent and ongoing efforts to deconstruct the “nature/culture” divide,” argue the guest editors Philipp Schorch and Nicholas Thomas (2024, this volume), the authors set out to “creatively reimagine museum collections” and consider how the museums of the future “might lead the way in reimagining and reconceptualizing human–environment relations.” The five articles in this section, written by academics and professionals from Germany, Denmark, and the UK, explore the historical rupture of nature versus culture in museums, reveal the “novel insights across different systems of being and knowing, such as Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies” and ask: “In what ways can innovative forms of scholarly engagement, curatorship, and experimental exhibitions reactivate historical collections as creative technologies, and so promote the re-imagination of human–environmental relations on a larger scale?”

In his article “The Entwined Human and Environmental Costs of the Colonial Project,” Jack Ashby points out that the analysis of natural history specimens and their records is being employed “on the frontline of tackling environmental issues that affect humanity profoundly: the climate and biodiversity crises.” This task can be enhanced by learning from the work of world cultures museums that have been “at the forefront of addressing questions of social justice and representation,” thus realizing the potential “that each discipline has for ‘crossing the street’ and adding power to efforts addressing both social justice and environmental crises” (Ashby 2024, this volume).

Next up, Gabriele Herzog-Schröder provides a fascinating case study of such cross-disciplinary research through the “intertwining” of nineteenth-century ethno-botanical Amazonian collections now in Bavaria. She challenges the division of historical collections into natural sciences and “cultural things” by developing an integrated “conceptual and methodological approach” to a ritual monkey mask made by the Ticuna/Magütá people in modern-day Brazil. Analyzing the various materials of which it is made, the author intertwines “anthropological, botanical, and historical strands of thought” to “reimagine and reconceptualize human–environment relations” (Herzog-Schröder 2024, this volume).

Anita Herle also focuses on an Amazonian object, in her case a feathered Munduruku headdress, and uses it to demonstrate how the relations between Natural History and Ethnography might be transformed. Formerly senior curator at the MAA at Cambridge, she argues that objects in collections can be seen as “repositories of environmental knowledge situated within particular cultural practices and ontologies,” which can be “reactivated through multidisciplinary research and collaboration with Indigenous knowledge holders.” In this case her analysis of the materiality, construction, history, and use of the headdress reveals its “transformative potential,” as well as providing “insights into museum practice, international networks of exchange, and the fragmented and dispersed nature of ‘museum evidence’” (Herle 2024, this volume).

In the next article, two professionals write about their current work at BIOTOPIA Naturkundemuseum Bayern, an exciting new museum project in Munich. According to Samara Rubinstein and Colleen M. Schmitz, this new museum of life and the environment seeks to “rearrange” the material culture of natural and cultural objects by “decentralizing authority and weaving together a plurality of voices and perspectives contained within material archives.” In doing so, they argue, collections become “material portals into past, present, and future ways of knowing.” Employing the overarching concept of the “Mesh of Life” serves to “transcend traditional dichotomies and lays the groundwork for reimagining museums and exhibition curation as an interstitial practice” (Rubinstein and Schmitz 2024, this volume).

Finally, in the last article in this section, Jody Joy takes us outside the museum into a “landscape of well-being,” leading us on a journey through Trumpington Meadows Country Park, Cambridge. Disrupting the nature–culture divide through the notion of cultural landscapes, understood as the collaborative products of humans and nonhumans, museum objects can be reconnected to the sites from which they were removed. This helps “link the museum and the landscapes where its collection items were made and used” (Joy 2024, this volume). Furthermore, he argues, reinserting museums, collections, and associated activities into the landscapes where artifacts originated helps improve health and well-being.

This special section demonstrates the value and relevance of joint research projects going on currently in the museum and university sectors. Here at Museum Worlds, we feel that the journal can facilitate advances in research by providing a platform to disseminate contemporary scholarship on and in the museum and its application to society. To this end, we recently distributed a CFP for special sections, inviting people to send in proposals on themes that fit the journal's remit—to trace and comment on major regional, theoretical, methodological, and topical themes and debates, and to encourage comparison of museum theories, practices, and developments in different global settings. We were delighted with the response and are now working with several editorial teams to develop new special sections for our next few issues.

In Museum Worlds 12 (2024), alongside the special section, we are pleased to include three research articles that explore related issues of decolonization, museum collections, and community access as played out between the UK, southern Africa, and North America. Laura Peers together with Lori and Christine Beavis examine “expanded loans” as another tool, besides repatriation, for Indigenous people to reconnect with their museum-held heritage, tracing a loan from the Royal Collection Trust to the Peterborough Museum and Archives in Canada, which was led by Hiawatha First Nation. This case study explores the “tensions and possibilities raised by expanded loans for providing meaningful access to and Indigenous sovereignty over ancestral items” (Peers, Beavis, and Beavis 2024, this volume). Njabulo Chipangura and Motsane Getrude Seabela discuss Zulu beadwork in the Manchester Museum and Ditsong National Museum of Cultural History in Pretoria, offering insights into the social biographies of museum collections from colonial contexts and how they can be decolonized through community collaborations. Lastly, in an article provocatively titled “Digitization Is Not Decolonization,” Laura Gibson interrogates the Amagugu Ethu Museum Project in South Africa, a Not-for-Profit organization whose digital Museum-in-a-Box is critically analyzed as “an important way of resisting and interrupting colonial knowledge production in (South) Africa's museums” (Gibson 2024, this volume).

This year's issue as usual has a range of reports on research in other forms, spanning history, theory, policy, and practice: Jason Gibson and his colleagues from the University of Deakin in Melbourne talk about their quest to form a distributed national collection bringing together GLAMs and universities across the continent; Lara Corona reports from Italy on her research into the use of museum collections through loans and exchanges; Neha Khetrapal reflects on the lessons from the Partition Museum in Delhi for “the new urban peace”; Zhitong Mu surveys the media profile of the Palace Museum in Beijing; and Jakki Leota-Mua, along with Toluma'anave Barbara Makuati-Afitu and Kolokesa Uafā Mahina-Tuai (Lagi-Maama Academy) discuss two exhibitions at Pātaka Art + Museum in Porirua (Aotearoa New Zealand) developed in partnership with the Moana Oceania (Pacific) diaspora communities of Nuie and Kiribati.

There are eight review essays in this issue mostly looking at exhibitions, including Our Colonial Inheritance at the Wereldmuseum (formerly the Tropenmuseum) in Amsterdam, Memory and Loss at the Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, the new North West Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, and The Holocaust at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, both in New York, and Jarracharra: Dry Season Winds at the National Crafts Museum, New Delhi. Meanwhile Sumi Kim visits the Museum of African Art in Korea, and Sara Selwood surveys recent exhibitions of ecological art in London.

There are also a host of reviews—eight of exhibitions and twelve of books—making Museum Worlds a very important avenue for reviewing new publications and exhibitions in museum and heritage studies, anthropology, and related fields. For this indispensable work we are indebted as always to our team of reviews editors who ensure a steady stream of up to date and diverse content spanning the globe. We especially thank Kristin Hussey and Joanna Cobley who are stepping down as editors for Europe and the Pacific/Moana Oceania respectively after several years of sterling service to the journal. We welcome Julia Binter, Argelander Professor for Critical Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Bonn in Germany, our new editor for Europe. Finally, as always, we thank the peer reviewers who generously provide feedback to our authors; Susette Goldsmith, copy editor extraordinaire; and the team at Berghahn.