Collecting with Community by Bruno Brulon Soares

Collecting with Community by Bruno Brulon Soares

Communities and collections lie at the heart of contemporary museums. Collecting with Community: How LGBTQI+ Heritage Survives explores the work of museums and archives at the grassroots level, seeking to understand how collections care intersects with the care for communities.

The book develops two central arguments. First, it claims that LGBTQI+ collections across Latin America formed as a rapid community response to state repression, challenging the monumental and celebratory value of public heritage. Second, it demonstrates how this community heritage produced in recent years is currently reshaping museology and redefining our understanding of collecting as a political act. Building on established literature around community museums and practices of social museology, Collecting with Community asks: what can we learn, as curators and scholars, from marginalised social groups caring for their own collections? Grounded on the life stories of LGBTQI+ activists and their collections, this book is an invitation to new generations of professionals around the globe working with or involved in communities to think critically about their practices and positionality. It is intended to serve as an unorthodox and disruptive guide for transformative curatorial work, while outlining some of the challenges of working with communities to generate social change.

Collecting with Community offers some practical and conceptual tools for museum workers, conceived through the lenses of social museology and informed by a radical ethics of care. Professionals working with collections and engaging with the people that value them, as well as scholars and students investigating museums, archives and memory transmission will hopefully find much inspiration within its pages.

Bruno Brulon Soares is a Reader in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of St Andrews, an award-winning author and experienced museologist. He has worked closely with community-based museums in Brazil and with several heritage projects at the grassroots level involving anticolonial practices and social movements. He was one of the co-founders of Museu Movimento LGBTI+, the first museum on the LGBTQI+ social movement in Brazil. He is Chair of the International Committee for Social Museology, SOMUS, and serves on several committees, including ICOM’s Standing Committee for Ethics. Between 2019 and 2022, he was the Chair of the International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) and co-Chair of the Standing Committee for the Museum Definition of ICOM. His research interests have focused on reparative museology, community-based museums and the political uses of museums and cultural heritage. His publications include the monograph The Anticolonial Museum (2023, also by Routledge), the co-edited volume Decolonising Museology (2020), and the The Museum Definition Handbook: Words Inspiring Action (2025) co-authored with Lauran Bonilla-Merchav.