Telling Difficult Histories, Advancing Human Rights
Trauma-informed, ethical consulting for museums, memorials, and cultural institutions around the world.
Our StoryDr. Danielle Megaffin Consulting works with museums, memorials, and cultural institutions around the world on the histories that are hardest to get right: mass atrocity, genocide, immigration, refuge, and displacement. These stories carry real weight. Survivors live with what happened. Communities carry it across generations. Visitors walk in carrying histories of their own. Telling these stories in an ethical manner takes more than good intentions, and that is where this practice begins.
Everything here is built on trauma-informed, ethical practice. In real terms, that means asking consent before using someone's testimony, thinking about what a Survivor will feel standing in front of a display about their own life, considering the front-of-house staff who answer visitors' hardest questions, and knowing the difference between honouring pain and exhibiting it. It means slowing down where the work demands it.
Whether you need untold stories drawn out of your collection, a new exhibition developed from the ground up, or support rethinking how your institution works, the aim stays constant: histories told with honesty and care, for institutions that want to earn the trust their communities place in them.
Consultation Services
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Hidden Histories in Your Collection
A focused, fixed-scope review that surfaces the untold stories your institution already holds, and shows you what to do with them. Your starting point.
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Exhibition Development for Difficult Histories
Full guidance from first concept to opening day for exhibitions on atrocity, displacement, and human rights, with care built in at every stage.
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Ethical Practice and Institutional Change
An ongoing partnership that examines inherited structures and builds your team's capacity to carry ethical practice forward on its own.
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Keynotes, conference sessions, workshops, and guest lectures on exhibiting difficult histories, trauma-informed interpretation, and the ethics of testimony. Grounded in doctoral research, delivered with care, in person or virtual.
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An expert review of your exhibition text, scripts, or interpretive plans before opening day. Practical written feedback that flags ethical risks and protects Survivors, communities, and visitors.
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Social media content and strategy for difficult histories. From a one-time audit of your channels to a full content plan or ongoing creation, your institution's hardest stories are told online with the same care as in your galleries.
Meet Dr. Danielle Megaffin
Dr. Danielle Megaffin is a curator, scholar, and consultant specializing in how museums and memorials tell histories of genocide, mass atrocity, and human rights. She holds a PhD in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, home to one of the world's leading museum studies programs. Her doctoral research examined how Canadian museums, including the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Canadian Museum of History, exhibit the history of settler colonial genocide and residential schools, and the ethical choices institutions make when displaying Survivor testimony and traumatic histories.
Her practice is grounded in more than fifteen years of museum experience across Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia, including the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and the Royal Ontario Museum. She is the founder and curator of the Museum of Addiction and Recovery, and serves as Reviews Editor for the journal Museums and Society. Her research has been recognized with the John C. Carter Award in Museums, presented to a student expected to lead change and innovation in the museum, gallery, and heritage field, and the Steve Simons Bursary for innovative research in exhibit design and visitor impact. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she partners with institutions around the world to tell difficult histories with honesty, care, and trauma-informed ethics.
Ethics Statement & Philosophy
Difficult histories demand difficult decisions: what to display, whose voice leads, how to honour pain without exhibiting it. These are ethical choices with real consequences for real people, and this practice treats them that way.
Empathy first. Empathy is the foundation to all our work. Every project begins with the people inside the story, and what it costs them to have it told.
Human judgment, always. Every piece of research and every ethical decision is made by a human being. AI cannot weigh a Survivor's dignity or take responsibility for a choice. This work is done by a person who can.
Dignity, consent, and care. Every community's story is told with equal respect, no story is used without consent, and the wellbeing of Survivors, communities, visitors, and staff comes before any deliverable.
Work with Me
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