Past event
Museums and Community Action: Decolonising the Curriculum (Part 1)
This international webinar, Museums and Community Action: Decolonising the Curriculum, will focus on how museum and heritage studies might address pressing debates on museum decolonisation and the recognition of local practices and actions.
The event, taking place over 22 and 23 April, is hosted by the School of Art History and forms part of an international series of ICOFOM conferences sponsored as an ICOM Special Project, uniting the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the University of Montreal in Canada, the University of St Andrews, and the Caribbean Association of Museums. The University of St Andrews iteration is supported by the Scottish Funding Council SARRF fund.
Professor Conal McCarthy and Awhina Tamarapa will deliver the keynote lecture, 'Teaching a master's course on museums and Māori: Decolonising and indigenising museum studies in Aotearoa New Zealand'.
Other topics include the need to incorporate unsubordinated knowledges and disobedient practices into the field; the idea of community museums as ideal spaces for decolonised university learning in Costa Rica; how museums can address climate change as an issue deeply connected with colonialism and inequality in the UK and internationally; the notion of 'historicising' as both a central tool of colonial power and a transformative process in the Caribbean; and pedagogies of positionality, relationality and re-existence.
Confirmed speakers include Professor Bruno Brulon Soares (UNIRIO Brazil; President of ICOFOM), Dr Lauran Bonilla-Merchav (University of Costa Rica), Henry McGhie (Curating Tomorrow), Professor Conal McCarthy (Director of Museum and Heritage Studies, Victoria University, New Zealand), Awhina Tamarapa (Teaching Fellow, Victoria University, New Zealand), Dr Rolando Vřzquez (Associate Professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and Cluster Chair at the University College Utrecht, University of Utrecht), Dr Wayne Modest (Director of Content, National Museum of World Cultures, Wereldmuseum Rotterdam and Head of the Research Center for Material Culture), Dr Heather Cateau (Dean, Faculty of Humanities & Education, The University of the West Indies St Augustine), and Alissandra Cummins (Director, Barbados Museum and Historical Society).
Full programme details. The webinar is free to attend.
Photo: Awhina Tamarapa, photograph by Ted Whitaker, Videographer, Image Services, Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. Objects: Private collection of Awhina Tamarapa.
Please register via Zoom for your free place.