Category: Museum Anthropology Blog

Via NPR, April 10, 2022

Most Holocaust survivors are in their 80s or 90s. With every year, fewer remain to tell us their stories. So museums and archives are using advanced technologies to preserve their testimonies and introduce them to new generations.

For example, at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, you can slip on a virtual reality headset and enter the world of survivor George Brent, at the moment the terrified teenager stepped off a boxcar at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

“There was a great deal of shouting –’Raus, raus, schnell, schnell! Leave everything behind!'” he says in the 12-minute film. It’s part of the exhibit “The Journey Back: A VR Experience,” which takes viewers from that first heartbreaking separation from his family to the grueling slave labor Brent was later forced to perform in the mines of the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria.

Brent, now 93 years old, is gentle and good-natured as he recalls making his part of “The Journey Back” on a Zoom call with NPR. He was too fragile to make a trip to Europe, he says, so the VR film based on his testimony used green screens to put him in some of the places he describes, such as the men’s concentration camp barracks and the loading docks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

More here.

It’s just a month until the May 2, 2022 deadline for applications to the African Critical Inquiry Programme’s student awards to help support dissertation research. Below is information on how interested students can apply.

ACIP_CFP_ResearchGrants2022_REMINDER

It’s just a month until the May 2, 2022 deadline for applications to the African Critical Inquiry Programme to organize the 2023 African Critical Inquiry Programme workshop. Below is information on how colleagues in South Africa can apply.

ACIP_CFP_Workshops2022_REMINDER

Via The New York Times, March 25, 2022

The British Museum here is to remove the name of the Sackler family from its walls, becoming the latest major cultural institution to cut ties with the family over its role in the opioid crisis.

The decision, announced in a news release on Friday, comes almost four months after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reached a similar joint agreement with the Sackler family to remove its name from several exhibition spaces, including the wing that houses the Temple of Dendur.

The British Museum said in the news release that the decision was “by mutual agreement” with the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation, one of the family’s British charities.

More here. 

Museum Anthropology is excited to invite new submissions for its 2023/24 publication year. We are especially interested in critical scholarship on care, return and repair; and explorations of museums and material culture in the anthropocene. We are keen to review full special issue proposals, as well as shorter, critical commentaries and exhibition reviews. The editorial office is particularly committed to providing a platform for and supporting the work of emerging scholars. Work for full length, peer reviewed, publications will be published in 2023/24.

Please review our Submission Guidelines here:https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/15481379/about/author-guidelines

All submissions can be made through the ScholarOne Portal: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/americananthro-ma.

Museum Anthropology seeks to be a leading voice for scholarly research on the collection, interpretation, and representation of the material world. Through critical articles, provocative commentaries, and thoughtful reviews, this peer-reviewed journal aspires to cultivate vibrant dialogues that reflect the global and transdisciplinary work of museums. Situated at the intersection of practice and theory, Museum Anthropology advances our knowledge of the ways in which material objects are intertwined with living histories of cultural display, economics, socio-politics, law, memory, ethics, colonialism, conservation, and public education.

For more information, please email the editor, Hannah Turner, at the editorial office:museumanthjournal@gmail.com.

During the summer of 2022, Munson Institute classes will be a part of the  Reimagining New England History: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom project. The Frank C. Munson Institute at Mystic Seaport Museum, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University and Williams College, will hold  classes at Mystic Seaport to interrogate  the region’s past.   The history and legacies  of settler colonialism, racial slavery, servitude, dispossession, Indigenous resistance  and  African-American strategies for fashioning pursuits of freedom will be considered.  A distinctive feature of this summer program will be the framing of these topics within the context of New England’s maritime setting, an environment that fostered interaction, mobility, and exploitation.

The Munson Institute is the leading, and often sole, center for the teaching of maritime history in the United States. It has offered graduate credit through the University of Connecticut for over 60 years while its faculty includes top maritime historians from across the United States.

More here.

The RAI FILM FESTIVAL 2023 is hosting an online academic conference, 6-10 March 2023. Paper presentations will be delivered live and will be followed by a Q&A with the public.

As always we welcome panel, roundtable and workshop proposals from academics and practitioners in anthropology and adjacent disciplines. For this edition we are also specifically inviting participants to consider:

Visual anthropology and speculative futures

We find ourselves in a moment in which it is difficult to imagine what the future holds. The war, the intensification of climate change and the pandemic have brought questions about the future in sharp relief for everyone. Of course, for those at the sharp end of history, the future has always been uncertain and an open challenge. In this increasingly uncertain present, questions about the place, temporality and role of visual/sensory/multimodal anthropology feel more pressing than ever. If, as Stuart Hall says, history is always unfinished business, then the future is always multiple and open to many possibilities. What is our part in revisiting histories and shaping possible futures?

These are not new questions, and visual/sensory/multimodal anthropologists have been productively working with collaborative and multimodal modes, questioning authority and authorship, and creating an anthropology that engages multiple publics and is world-making. Afro- Indo- and Indigenous Futurisms, along with other related artistic and literary genres, have long engaged questions of temporality and futurity. These have been significant in shaping contemporary visual anthropologists’ practices and approaches and opened the future as something to be investigated, not as a remote possibility, but as an active agent in the production of now.

More here.

The Field Museum is in search of an Anthropology Collections Managerto join our team! The Field Museum is a not-for-profit museum located on Chicago’s Museum Campus. In the Field’s 125+ year history, which started in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in the “White City,” we have engaged in research on all seven continents, cultivated a collection of over 40 million specimens and objects, engaged with hundreds of thousands of students from Chicago and the surrounding areas, and welcomed millions of visitors to the Museum each year.  We accomplish this through the efforts of our dynamic and diverse staff of not only scientists and educators, but also front line staff in Visitor Services and Membership, Protection Services, Facility Planning and Operations, as well as behind the scenes support staff.

The individual in this full-time (35 hours per week), regular position is responsible for the care of and access to the North American Anthropology collections. They will work closely with Native American and First Nations cultural representatives as well as a team of Anthropology collections, conservation, registration, curatorial, and repatriation staff to ensure the respectful care of and access to cultural heritage and to implement collections priorities. This care includes the handling, storage, housing, organization, inventory, and photography of cultural collections. They will work with Curators to make recommendations regarding new acquisitions and loans as well as to improve policies, procedures, and practices. They will coordinate maintenance of collections facilities. They may supervise Collections Assistants, Interns, and Volunteers.

More here.

We seek an emerging curator of American art, focused primarily on pre-1960s art and material culture, who will deepen our presentations and offer fresh perspectives that expand the definition of American art for twenty-first century audiences. In addition to proposing ideas for exhibitions, the Assistant Curator will work closely with the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art to support the development and implementation of exhibitions, bring all aspects of projects together, cultivate patrons, and strengthen the collection through research and acquisition. Especially welcome are candidates with a demonstrated commitment to producing innovative and expansive research, and to advancing art historical narratives that have been marginalized across the field.

More here.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is seeking to fill the vacant position of Supervisory Museum Program Manager (Department Head), Research & Scholars Center. The primary purpose of the position is to manage the office and its program areas including short- and long-term planning to strengthen, expand, and extend office programs, formulate policy, and supervision of professional and administrative staff. The incumbent promotes the office and its resources among scholars and other professional constituencies. The Research & Scholars Center includes SAAM’s Scholarly and Academic Programs (including fellows, interns, and the American Art Journal), art research databases (national art inventories, permanent collection database and digital asset management database), and special collections (photograph archives, Paik and Cornell archives).

More here.

Via AAA: 

This is a reminder that the deadline to start your submission for the 2022 Annual Meeting General Call for Participation is Wednesday, March 30 at 11:59 PM ET. All submissions must be completed by Wednesday, April 6 at 11:59 PM ET. We invite research presentations in a variety of formats — use our interactive tool to select your presentation type. This year’s meeting will take place in Seattle, WA, November 9 -13 and will offer options for both in-person and virtual attendance. We hope that this approach will broaden learning opportunities and also allow members to safely network and reconnect with colleagues from across the country.

• Deadline for General Call for Participation Submissions to be started in the Portal
  • Wednesday, March 30, 2022—11:59 PM Eastern Time
• Deadline for General Call for Participation Submissions to be submitted in the Portal.
  • Wednesday, April 06, 2022—11: 59 PM Eastern Time
• Accept / Decline Notices Sent to Executive and General Call Submitters
  • Week of July 05, 2022
• Speaker Portal Launches for Executive and General Call Submitters
  • Week of July 05, 2022
• Deadline for Speaker Portal Tasks
  • Wednesday, September 14, 2022—11:59 PM Eastern Time