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Mar 18

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Hannover: Commons–Free Software, Free Content, Open Access

I am in Hannover for the day at the final day of a conference titled “Commons, Users, Service Providers: Internet (Self-) Regulation and Copyright. The focus today is Commons – Free Software, Free Content, Open Access and I have already learned a lot. I will try to write it up when it is complete.  So far there have been presentations by insiders on the GPL, internationalizing Creative Commons, and on court cases related to open source software.

Mar 15

Cultural Property Research Group, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Very happily, I have begun a week-long visit to Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. I am very fortunate to be the guest of the Cultural Property Research Group. This is a major interdisciplinary project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). I very much recommend their research weblog (here) and the project website (here).

Today I spent time talking to some of the doctoral students in law and in cultural anthropology/European ethnology/folklore studies who are pursuing dissertation projects within the larger research group. They’re all wonderfully smart and very generous in their patience with an American who has never spoken a word of German in his life. In addition to beginning discussions of their interesting projects, they taught me a bit about the changing nature of academic life in Germany and showed me around their beautiful campus and city.

While I will hopefully have something from my own work to offer my hosts, I am enjoying learning about their studies and connecting them with the work of favorite (and very relevant) colleagues back home who are working on similar issues. I was reassured by the familiarity of the topics that we discussed today.  In the usual one-thing-leads-to-another fashion we jumped from geographic indicators to WIPO policy, open source software, cultural appropriation, human rights, heritage lists, and open access.

Thanks to everyone involved in my visit possible.

Mar 5

CMA Seeks Proposals for Invited Sessions at AAA 2010

Council for Museum Anthropology members are invited to submit session proposals for consideration for CMA sponsorship. Sessions sponsored by CMA are assured a place in the annual meeting program. Any topic relating to museum anthropology will be considered, but sessions that speak to broad issues in the field or engage the AAA membership more directly in issues of museum practice or representation are particularly solicited. Please send a session abstract and list of proposed speakers (need not be confirmed yet) to Candace Greene, CMA VP, at greenec@si.edu. Information exchange about sessions that are still in development is also welcome. Our goal is to continue to develop a robust discourse around museum anthropology as  part of the AAA annual meeting program.