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Pencil sketch of a smiling face © Al Hopwood

An exciting new digital collaboration and podcast series explores the potential for fakes to reveal hidden truths and considers the ethics of using fakes as a revelatory or investigative method.

Museum of Revelatory Fakes (MoRF) centres on a series of case studies, which feature creative responses, archival materials, and podcast interviews. Each case study reveals something different about the power of fakes and their potential to be used in the pursuit both of discovery and misinformation, such as the use of ‘mystery’ or ‘pseudo’ patients in hospitals to expose fake doctors.

The podcast series draws on the expertise and experiences of a range of contributors to explore issues of relevance to us all, such as the resilience of online hoaxes, the role of trust in medical care, and the powerful desire for the impossible to be true.

The first episode interviews Dr Elisa Granato, Oxford microbiologist and the first person to receive the pioneering Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, who subsequently became the victim of a bizarre death hoax.

MoRF is a partnership between Professor Patricia Kingori (the Ethox Centre and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Oxford Population Health) and artist Al Hopwood. Professor Kingori is a sociologist whose work focuses on the ethics of global health. Her Wellcome Trust-funded ‘Fakes, Fabrications and Falsehoods in Global Health’ research project explores concerns about the roles that fakes, authenticity and quality play in global health and the process of discerning the ‘real’ in everyday settings. Al Hopwood is an award-winning visual and conceptual artist whose recent work includes the False Memory Archive and a major curatorial project, Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic at the Wellcome Collection.

MoRF has been supported by Enriching Engagement funding (a pilot scheme open to Wellcome grant holders at the University of Oxford to develop and deliver Public Engagement with Research projects) and TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), a hub for intellectual collaboration and cross disciplinary research projects, based in the Humanities at the University of Oxford.