Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics and Re-Storying
From Biocultural Landscapes at Risk to Archiving the Dead
1. Auflage August 2026
320 Seiten, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Over the last twenty years, digital anthropology challenged the standard academic practice on interactive media design, environmental communication, and digital research with thought-provoking and cutting-edge ethical questions. Currently, these quandaries are being hotly discussed across different disciplines at academic conferences and in academic literature, but have not been made accessible to students.
The proposed textbook addresses the ethically-charged aspects of digital technologies, treating the digital as a resourceful yet problematic space where new forms of storytelling, exhibition, research, and collaboration are possible. Each of the twelve chapters challenges students to investigate a key debate on new and emerging digital technologies while also dispelling false conceptions on democracy and accessibility, the digital "green revolution", and the power of technology to neutralise social power dynamics (for example, by giving marginalized communities the chance to denounce or document social injustices).
Coverage spans from digital consent and access of digital spaces (including neural atypical access, as well as WIFI availability and digital literacy) to emerging trends involving augmented and virtual reality (e.g. virtual repatriation strategies and woke-washing). Special attention is devoted to the decolonization of anthropology, archaeology, and museum studies, in particular the risks, challenges and opportunities of exhibiting death. Offering case studies from archaeological and ethnographic university collections, chapters 7-10 examine how and why museums decided to remove, recontextualize, and/or repatriate human remains to indigenous communities, why photos of human remains are not always included in museum collections, and new taxonomies for digital archival methods.
Written with undergraduate and graduate students in mind, Digital Ethics is a ground-breaking and interdisciplinary book for courses in Interactive Media Design, Museum Studies, Communication studies, Archaeology, Anthropology, Environmental studies, and Indigenous studies. There is no other title that showcases the major ethical dilemmas of digital anthropology at a time when intersectionality, decolonization, and climate justice are at the top of most university program's goals.
Chapter 1: Digital justice and the enduring legacy of white settler colonialism
Chapter 2: Are Humans separate from Nature? How Digital Justice is related to Environmental Conservation
Chapter 3: Decolonial re-storying and storywork
Chapter 4: Digital interventions are also analogue. Partnering and collaborating with communities
Chapter 5: Decolonial and Digital Conservation
Chapter 6: Who Owns the Data and Whose Story is Left out? Thinking through Data sharing and Sovereignty
Chapter 7: How does the digital format matter? What is the point of virtual repatriation?
Chapter 8: Decolonial Examinations of British Museums: Display, Study, and Dehumanization of the Dead
Chapter 9: Archiving the Dead: Repatriating Ancestors in British Museum and Archaeological Contexts
Chapter 10: Curator's Perspectives : Colonial Discourses on Caring for, Archiving, and Exhibiting the North African Dead in British Museums
Chapter 11. Ethics is Unavoidably Nested in Conceptualizing the Future
Sarah Hiepler-Basty completed her PhD at the University of Aberdeen, where her research focused on the discursive framing of human remains in museums. She has guest lectured and taught social science courses at University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen and Southern Methodist University. She has extensive museum and archaeological fieldwork and experience in Italy, the UK and the United States.