Best Practices for Scientific Collaboration and Ethical Considerations When Working With Human Remains in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT The roles and responsibilities we occupy as scientists working directly with human remains are diverse, requiring careful ethical consideration. In Southeast Asian contexts, it has been important for us experts and scholars to be in constant correspondence and collaboration, deriving scientific insights into human health, life histories, and body forms on one hand, and balancing ethical and community‐based concerns on the other. We have learnt—out of necessity—to navigate a global landscape that is rife with postcolonial legacies that perpetuate the practice of expropriation of samples/data from our collections, and discriminatory attitudes in collaborative settings. We remain engaged with broader community and committed to stewarding our collections with care and deliberation. Through a questionnaire, our team assembled semi‐autobiographical qualitative data on our lived realities as Southeast Asian scientists. We evaluate our own collaborations and suggest best practices for moving forward in different forms of work, research, and teaching. We are optimistic about further drawing community and deriving protocols that promote total stakeholder equity. We hope all future work with human remains occurs in alignment with locally informed frameworks of respect, care and mutual understanding.