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Posts from the ‘Conferences’ Category

Oct 8

Hurricanes, Fires, and Scholarly Societies Now

A satellite image of hurricane Milton via PBS https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/live-map-track-the-path-of-hurricane-milton

My parents raised me to worry about hurricanes and hurricane season. I grew up on the coasts of Florida, as did my parents themselves. Floridians, but not of the Florida Man variety, hurricane season was for them about making plans and preparations. This involved learning about, and mitigating risks, making plans, getting supplies, having shutters, marking storm locations on maps printed in daily papers, watching the weather news and much more. These kinds of preparation were not abstract, as my family weathered numerous actual storms of greater or lesser impact. While our home was never severely impacted, we had access to plenty of examples of how devastating tropical storms could be, both pictured on the local news and in family oral tradition.

As if the job of leading a scholarly society is not challenging enough now on other fronts, society leaders have—like my parents when I was growing up—to think about such things as hurricane seasons, fire seasons, and the practical implications of anthropogenic climate change. Leaders of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), for instance, know this because many of them experienced their own 2018 annual conference in San Jose, California. Here is how then first-time attendee Ian Pollock described it afterwards in December 2018

Darkening the sky, hanging in the rafters of the convention center, and stinging the throats and eyes of everyone who came, the smoke of the major fires ravaging California was an inescapable presence. The AAA president, in his opening remarks, acknowledged the forensic anthropologists from Cal State Chico who were at that moment assisting in the recovery and identification of bodies from towns destroyed by the fire. Zoe Todd was among many who commented on the smoke, calling it a kind of message: the land itself telling us about the violence of the settler colonial structures on which California is built.

I was reminded of Kim Fortun’s recent interview on The Familiar Strange podcast, in which she talked about living in toxic times. She argued that anthropologists can respond as a disaster unfolds, and not just in the aftermath. I also thought of a recent workshop at Deakin University in Melbourne, called “Writing Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene.” As the organizers wrote in their call for participants:

[Block quote in block quote] ‘Slow disaster describes the long process of environmental and infrastructural degradation produced by inadequate risk assessments, industrial regulations, and the political narratives that shape design decisions of human-environment relations. The longer temporal perspective provided by slow disaster can help index political, infrastructural, and social dynamics in relation to the new terrains and atmosphere emerging in the Anthropocene. Writing slow disaster draws attention to, and works through, the entanglements of climate crises, structural violence, and the legacies of industrialism.’

San Jose, after all, is basically an adjunct to Silicon Valley, home of techno-utopians and their confidence that every problem can be solved with a technological solution, and a concentration of wealth like the world has never seen before. The fires that sent up the smoke choking San Jose were distant still, but creeping ever closer. No blue-sky thinking could dispel the haze.

Beyond the structural lessons of such episodes, there are also just the practical realities. Sometimes the show, or the annual meeting, just must go on, but it goes on in such a way that falls far short of its organizer’s hopes for reasons not within their immediate control. One can have, for instance, a bad meeting where everyone is talking about bad air or a meeting that loses money and thereby impedes other work.

Or, sometimes scholarly meetings have to be cancelled. COVID led to this dynamic on a vast scale and I was involved as an organizer for the 2020 American Folklore Society (AFS) meeting that eventually was realized in Tulsa in 2022. Hotel contracts and meeting plans loom as the most mission critical, financially significant, and ultimately risky undertakings that scholarly societies pursue. They are where the largest amount of staff and volunteer labor, and member activity and expenditure, resides for most of the societies in the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Natural disasters, pandemic diseases, and, strikes and labor actions (three real world matters that are linked at a deeper level) are all threats that scholarly society leaders wind up needing to understand and manage to the best of their ability, but they cannot directly prevent or control them. The best that they can do is to seek to mitigate risk and impact.

It has been a long time since I first started tracking these issues. Meeting locations, meeting contracts (which are complex and involve varied actors), the implications of locations and contracts for both society members and local people, including local scholarly and cultural organizations, as well as local workers are, and have long been, matters of great concern within and beyond scholarly societies. But today, they are weighted with many additional concerns. The AAA has witnessed some of those additional concerns and their impacts as AAA members have passionately debated the pros and cons of holding its meeting this year in Tampa, Florida (and the pros and cons of attending). I bracket out those for now and just focus on the newest facts known to me on the morning of October 8.

I hope that Hurricane Milton, presently a major storm spinning over the superheated Gulf of Mexico and headed towards a coastline centered on Tampa Bay petters out quickly and causes no damage or harm to anyone or anything, but Florida (and Georgia and North Carolina and Tennessee) has not yet recovered from the devastation of recent Hurricane Helene. The work of Helene recovery makes Milton even more dangerous as the Tampa area is piled high with debris ready to be blown or washed away, aggravating further any damage that Milton might otherwise cause if/when it makes landfall. This matters for the AAA leaders because the 2024 annual meeting of the AAA, which was already under great stress for sociopolitical reasons, is only 43 days away and set for Tampa. I want Milton to produce no injuries, no destruction of infrastructure, no negative impacts of any kind. As an expected attendee at the upcoming meeting, I want only good things for my fellow AAA members and the people of my home state. As a member of the Council for Museum of Anthropology (CMA) board and thus a minor AAA elected leader, I am worried not only about the “regular” human risks, but also about the risks to the AAA as a society. A whole generation of vexing and difficult annual meetings (not just San Jose in 2018) have already impacted AAA membership and AAA finances. Like so many institutions, scholarly societies have been being ground down by a range of contemporary processes and dynamics. Massive fires are a climate change part of this that we can discuss from experience, but there are scholarly societies right now, on the day that I write this, who are cancelling their annual meetings specifically due to Hurricane Milton (Google it for evidence and for Helene cancelations as well). I hope to be in Tampa for a great AAA meeting, but it is only prudent, as with my parent’s yearly preparations and close attention to the weather, to be cognizant that Hurricane Milton could impact the AAA meeting set for November 20-24, 2024. And the Tampa meeting has already faced challenges increasingly typical of the current gestalt.

In the series of posts that this one joins, I am trying to think out loud about the newer challenges that leaders of scholarly societies generally, and of my scholarly societies particularly, are facing, and that they have no choice but to face. Severe weather and natural disasters are not new, of course. And scholarly societies have weathered such things before and will do so in the future. But the political, economic, social, and organizational environments are worsening, and anthropogenic climate change is making the weather more variable and, in the case of massive fires and powerful storms, more dangerous. It would be a significant thing if this were the only change to which scholarly society leaders needed to help their organization adapt, but it is just one on a long and growing list.

I wish for only good things for the people of Florida and I appreciate all that the elected and professional leaders of the AAA and AFS are doing to keep these societies mission-focused and effective in vexing time. That work is not easy.

Oct 3

Storm Warning: Public Funds and Scholarly Societies

Marine Weather Warnings, via NOAA, https://marinenavigation.noaa.gov/weather-warnings.html

Unburying the lede: This post is about efforts to sever the financial, and therefore mutual aid, links presently connecting scholarly societies and universities (etc.). It is thus about an existential threat to both scholarly societies and those institutions and publics that they serve.

I grew up on the coasts of Florida which means I grew up with hurricanes. When a hurricane has made landfall in your coastal city, it is too late to bother with raising the warning flags.

To sustain the scholars and practitioners, and broader publics, that they serve, scholarly societies in the humanities and the social sciences have no choice but to focus on emerging storms on, and beyond, the horizon as well as to take account of changing weather and climate patterns that might be making storms more frequent, more powerful, and potentially more destructive. While ensuring that things go well on a day-to-day basis, during sunny and partly cloudy days, scholarly society leaders need to also focus on identifying and preparing for the storms that are likely to come. Societies that are aware of, and that have been prepared for them, are better positioned to weather what comes. If we set aside the weather metaphor, in some cases, societies may be able to mobilize and prevent, and not just prepare for, the threats they face.

In dialogue with colleagues, I have been trying to enumerate some of the challenges that seem to threaten scholarly societies based in the United States. While the American Folklore Society (AFS) is foremost on my mind in this context, I am a presently a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a constituent section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and thus I have AAA on my mind also.

Scholarly societies, such as those that (like AFS and AAA) are members of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), are in close relationship with college and universities, as well as with other institutional settings in which academics, public humanists, and applied social scientists work. These other settings include museums, archives, public folklore agencies, federal, state, and local government agencies, NGOs, and other kinds of public-interest organizations. Most obviously, scholarly societies provide manifold opportunities to their members and these opportunities benefit those individuals who work in these organizations. They thus benefit the organizations in which we work and those we serve. Some obvious examples include providing venues for research exchange, professional development activities, disciplinary and interdisciplinary networking, scholarly publication venues, and basic infrastructure for healthy disciplinary work. I am capturing just a fraction of the benefits that scholarly societies provide to their members and to the fields and workplaces in which they serve. I know any readers that I find here know these things.

Scholarly societies rely upon their members in manifold ways, of course, but they also depend on the organizations that those members work in, and serve. Here, I will identify just a four of the most obvious points of reliance and connectivity.

  1. Scholarly societies are publishers and key purchasers of those publications are the libraries maintained by universities and other institutions. Institutional funds thus support publications while publications in turn support students, faculty, curators, etc. within these institutions. This relationship has long been central to the work of scholarly communications. Societies need library subscribers and libraries serve their constituents through these subscriptions (or through institutional participation in open access alternatives).
  2. In numerous but (I know, I know) not all contexts, institutions subsidize staff or student participation in scholarly society conferences. This can take various forms, including such things as internal student travel grants for graduate students or full or partial travel funds allotted to university faculty members or institutional staff members (as at museums). The bottom line is that some attendees at an AFS meeting have been partially or perhaps fully supported in their attendance. Usually, such subsidies are tied to the individual presenting new research at the meeting or participating actively in some other fashion on the program of the meeting. Such individuals often need to report on their participation to their colleagues afterwards to help further spread the benefits of this investment.
  3. In some settings, those employed by in-field institutions will have their scholarly society membership paid for with research funds or other funding made available to the faculty member or other relevant staff members. I am well-aware of the variation existing on this point and I know that a society such as AFS has numerous members who lack access to such support, but as a matter of fact, such support exists. It is valuable both to those who receive it and to the society as a whole. Just as journal subscriptions help support journal publication and meeting subsidies support the production of a successful scholarly meeting (for everyone), dues subsidies contribute to the very existence of a scholarly society and make it possible for that organization to serve its membership, its field, and its publics. Whether paid for by employers or by members themselves, dues make scholarly infrastructure and scholarly connectivity possible.
  4. Finally, scholarly societies are frequently hosted by specific institutions. This is not always so, but for smaller societies, this local hosting is often crucial. It can take two forms, both of which are relevant to AFS (and one of which [i.e. 4B] is quite relevant to AAA). (4A) A scholarly society’s home office can be based at a university or other institution. For instance, the AFS office is based at Indiana University Bloomington where it is affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences and partnered with the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Such relationships are ideally durable across extended periods. To exist and endure, they always involve mutual benefit, with society resources advancing host institutional goals and, reciprocally, university (etc.) resources helping advance society ones. (4B) Shorter-term are instances when institutions host journal editorial offices. In this mode, one (perhaps more than one) institution agrees to assist the work of one or more of its faculty members in “taking on” the work of editing or co-editing a society journal, usually for a handful of years. In this mode, for instance, George Mason University has contributed in important ways to “hosting” the editorial office for the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), the primary peer-reviewed publication of the AFS. The JAF editorial team is comprised of George Mason University and the university leadership there has seen the value in helping the local faculty succeed in their editorial work. (More generally, institutions can allow for, and encourage students, faculty, and staff to take on other service roles within scholarly societies.)

Why have I spent over 1000 words laying this out? Because the things that that I have just described, which have never been in rock solid shape or universally observed, are now fundamentally in question. I am not speaking of familiar “budget challenges” but of an newer and more fundamentally existential matter.

To understand that which to I refer, I direct readers the American Enterprise Institute’s report “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups that Trade Academics for Advocacy” (Greene and Hess 2024a, 2024b). There has been surprising little coverage of this report in higher education circles but it is starting to be talked about and those presently leading scholarly societies in and beyond the humanities and social sciences have no choice, I think, but to consider it and related initiatives that will begin as think tank reports and that will likely manifest as state-level legislation.

Responding will not be so simple as, for instance, just stopping issuing statements that others deem political. It does not really work that way under present conditions. It may or may not be a good idea for scholarly societies to issue statements deemed political by their members or by others, but every scholarly society ultimately has a domain of expertise, whether that is Icelandic poetry, southern barbecue, or nuclear arms control. Every area of expertise is subject to being framed as political and yet every scholarly society has a fundamental obligation to leverage and share the expertise of its members for the public good. This emerging storm is riddled with lose-lose dynamics. To change metaphors from storms to software, these dynamics are a feature and not a bug. They are part of a larger contest for the future that is well underway. And they are connected closely to still wider problems that scholarly societies, and other nodes in our networks all face. These are old problems taking new and more vexing forms:  questions of free speech and civic discourse; questions of purpose in both universities and public service organizations; the nature of facts, knowledge, and expertise. They unfold in a degraded, and degrading social, and also literal, environment—locally, nationally, and globally and the co-occur with other unprecedented problems from those being raised by artificial intelligence (LLMs have already been built on the writings of members of ACLS societies) to climate change (which is not only impacting members of ACLS societies but is also impacting the basic, collective work of all scholarly societies).

Scholarly society leaders now cannot lose sight of the need to cultivate joy in their members, to boost morale, and to celebrate the good work that those members, and their societies, do, day in and day out. But the work is getting harder and those charged to lead scholarly societies, both as staff and as elected leaders, really have to choice by to make sense of, and try to adapt to, a very complex and unhealthy institutional environment. The AFS, the AAA, and any other ACLS society would be diminished in massive ways if even some U.S. states adopted no-funds-for-scholarly-societies legislation.

Greene, Jay P., and Frederick M. Hess. 2024a. “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups That Trade Academics for Advocacy.” AIE-American Enterprise Institute (blog). September 26, 2024. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/scholarly-associations-gone-wild-stop-publicly-funding-scholarly-groups-that-trade-academics-for-advocacy/.

Greene, Jay P., and Frederick M. Hess. 2024b. “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups That Trade Academics for Advocacy.” Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Scholarly-Associations-Gone-Wild-Stop-Publicly-Funding-Scholarly-Groups-That-Trade-Academics-for-Advocacy.pdf

Apr 21

CFP: Quilt and Textile Studies for Uncoverings 2020

Mathers Museum of World Cultures Research Associate Janice Frisch, who is editor of Uncoverings, shares the following call for papers.

Call for Papers
Quilt and Textile Studies
Uncoverings 2020

The American Quilt Study Group is looking for papers for the 2020 issue of their research journal, Uncoverings, edited by Dr. Janice E. Frisch.

The American Quilt Study group establishes and promotes the highest standards for interdisciplinary quilt-related studies, providing opportunities for study, research, and the publication of works that advance the knowledge of quilts and related subjects.

We are interested in papers that explore global patchwork and quilting traditions, both historical and modern. Papers that explore topics that influenced the global production of patchwork and quilting are also welcome, such as those that focus on technological changes, influences from other mediums, and impacts of historical and contemporary events. Ethnographic and historic research are both welcome.

Submissions should be complete papers with abstract and end notes (the journal uses the Chicago Note system and no bibliography). Papers should be between 4,500 and 9,000 words, inclusive of notes and must be submitted by June 1, 2019.

You do not have to be a member of the American Quilt Study Group to submit a paper, but you will have to join if your paper is selected. Authors of selected papers will also need to be able to attend the 2020 AQSG Seminar in Harrisonburg, VA (Sept. 9-14, 2020) to present their work. Paper presenters usually receive grants to offset registration, hotel, and travel costs for attending seminar.

Additional information on the submission process and the journal can be found here: https://americanquiltstudygroup.org/manuscript-guidelines/

If you have questions please contact the American Quilt Study Group at: aqsg2@americanquiltstudygroup.org

The journal welcomes paper submissions by June 1 of each year, so please consider submitting next year if you are unable to meet this year’s deadline.

—

The following image is my own selection–Jason.

A array of small pieces of Florida Seminole patchwork in many colors and designs.

Sample Florida Seminole patchwork strips from the William C. Sturtevant Collection at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

Apr 15

CFP: Studying Traditional Crafts: Goals and Methods in Higher Education

Here is a call for papers for an exciting conference in Estonia. The hosts are wonderful colleagues whom I met while visiting Viljandi last fall. Their call is quoted below. –Jason

Studying Traditional Crafts: Goals and Methods in Higher Education

Viljandi, Estonia, November 12–14, 2019

OPEN CALL!

The academisation of traditional crafts means studying traditional handicraft techniques, carrying out high-quality research in the field and being involved in creative activities. It requires developing new teaching and research methods by combining and integrating specialized expertise in different fields within natural science, humanities and social sciences. However, it brings along many challenges such as balancing between theoretical research and practical training; balancing between tradition and innovation; economic pressure to adapt to large groups with less contact time; high teachings costs and need for well-equipped labs, etc.

Estonian Native Craft Department at University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy celebrates its 25th anniversary with an international conference dedicated to different topics that explore the role of craft studies in higher education. Higher education on traditional crafts provides a framework for discussing tradition as a dynamic cultural process and describing heritage as environmental, cultural and societal assets for the continued development of society in local, national and global perspectives. It empowers people to make intentional decisions about their environment and material culture.

At the conference we would like to discuss inter alia the following topics:

  • teaching/learning approaches; changes in the educational models
  • definition of traditional crafts in different countries and contexts
  • social responsibility and knowledge transfer: what we do and what is expected of us
  • integration between science, technology, entrepreneurship and traditional crafts
  • the process of creating a new professional tradition
  • research methods and sources (museum repositories and documenting crafts)
  • diversity and potential of traditional ways of production in the contemporary society
  • professional development opportunities and increasing the level of competence
  • philosophy for the reconstruction and preservation
  • building local identities and doing international cooperation between HEIs

We invite to participate scholars, teachers, students, and practitioners. We welcome proposals for individual presentations reflecting the themes proposed above (20 minutes), and for poster presentations. Proposals should include title, name of presenter/co-presenters, name of institution/organization, email address, technological needs, and a 300-word abstract describing your proposed presentation. The conference language is English.

Please submit a proposal by e-mail to the address: craftconference2019@ut.eeThe deadline for the abstracts is May 20, 2019.

More information is available on https://sisu.ut.ee/craftconference2019

I am very thankful if you can spread the information to all whom it may concern.

All the best,

Ave Matsin

University of Tartu Viljandi  Culture Academy
Vice Director for Academic Affairs, MA
Head of Department of Estonian Native Crafts
Posti 1, Viljandi 71004
Estonia

 

Nov 25

CFP: Limitations and Adaptations: Negotiating Aesthetics, Power, and Positionality

I am happy to share the call for papers for the 12th joint student folklore conference organized by the students at Indiana University and the Ohio State University. Save the date and get your plans together to attend in Bloomington.

Limitations and Adaptations: Negotiating Aesthetics, Power, and Positionality
Twelfth Annual IU/OSU Student Folklore Conference
February 22–23, 2019

The Indiana University Folklore Student Association, in collaboration with the Folklore Student Association at the Ohio State University, invites submissions for the twelfth annual Indiana University / Ohio State University student folklore conference to be held in Bloomington, Indiana on February 22–23, 2019. We welcome proposals from folklore, ethnomusicology, and related disciplines. Presenters are encouraged to submit proposals related to the conference theme of “Limitations and Adaptations.” Some questions to consider could include the following:

  • What limits do people face in vernacular cultural production? How are these limits formed or identified? What are the power structures behind them?
  • How do limits shape artistic production?
  • How do people use vernacular cultural production to transcend limits/barriers or to adapt to change/oppression?
  • Does adaptation create or take place in a liminal space?
  • How do people adapt to limitations cross-culturally?
  • How might researchers be limited by factors such as identity, language, and environment? What impact might these limits have on selection, collection, or transmission of research?
  • What is the role of the researcher in either adhering to or pushing back against limitations? Is your project overcoming limitations in some way?

Proposals for papers, posters, roundtables, panels, workshops, and other formats are welcome. All presenters should write a 250-word abstract of their presentations. Prearranged or collective sessions should additionally include a session title, 250-word session abstract, and list contacts for all members of the panel/roundtable, if relevant.

All submissions will be due via google forms by December 30, 2018.

Submission link: https://goo.gl/forms/AX0ngluMRtgLcZZy2

Housing form: https://goo.gl/forms/FnaiT2R7nLOnPMhV2

For additional questions, please contact us at iuosu2019@gmail.com.

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Nov 1

At the Estonian National Museum

#fulbrightspecialist #fulbright #exchangeourworld

This is the third of three anticipated posts on my fall 2019 visit to Estonia (1st, 2nd).

A great resource for the University of Tartu’s departments of Estonian Native Craft, of Ethnology, and of Estonian and Comparative Folklore is the Estonian National Museum (ENM). The museum is curates vast collections of relevance to students and researchers in these fields and the museum is a research hub for all them. Founded in 1909, the ENM has a long and distinguished history as an ethnography museum centering on Estonia and, more broadly, all peoples speaking Finno-Ugric languages. It its contexts, the museum’s work centers on an Estonian instance of Northern European ethnology (with Soviet “ethnography” dominating during the period of Soviet hegemony). But not long ago (2016), the museum moved into a dramatic and vast new facility and unveiled a pair of large new permanent exhibitions.

These exhibitions move beyond (but fully include) the ethnography of 19th and early 20th century peasant lifeways. In this mode, the new exhibitions show an additive expansion of the museum’s concerns to include the archaeology of the distant past, historical and contemporary linguistics, social history, and the ethnology of everyday life in the recent period and the present. Especially in its exhibition work, the new museum is working at the cutting edge of museum technology and communication research is a part of the museum’s practice and research agenda.

Estonian_National_Museum_in_Tartu

The entry to the Estonian National Museum at night. By Klarqa. CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, from Wikimedia Commons

I will not offer a review of the two permanent exhibitions here, but I want to stress how much I learned about museum practice (and about Estonia and Finno-Urgric peoples) from my multiple visits to the museum’s galleries. I was very fortunate to be given introductory tours of both exhibitions by curators who were central to the work of developing them. Encounters tells the story of people in Estonia from the earliest moments of human activity in the territory of the present nation up to the present. Encounters is actually an interconnected suite of topical and chronological sub-exhibitions and I benefited greatly from seeing it first with Kristel Rattus and Liisi Jaats, two ENM researchers/curators who were part of the exhibition development team. Similarly, I saw the Echo of the Urals exhibition with Art Leete, Professor of Ethnology at the University of Tartu and specialist on Finno-Ugric groups in present-day Russia. Art led the curatorial team for the Finno-Ugric exhibition. The two exhibitions use a wide range of sophisticated exhibition techniques and these techniques are markedly different between the two shows, making the ENM an ideal teaching and learning laboratory for museum ethnology.

While I was more learner than teacher in this context, my work at the University of Tartu teaching the short “Material Culture and the Museum” course intersected with the ENM in a couple of ways. Because the ENM is such an attraction and hub for folklore studies and ethnology, (all or almost all) students and auditors in the course were familiar with the museum and it thus could be used as a valuable point of reference in and out of class sessions. More directly, the ENM hosted the 2018 International Committee for Museums and Collections of Ethnography (ICME) conference. I will touch on that below, but I note here that students participating in the course were obligated to attend parts of the ICME meeting, an activity that I feel certain greatly enhanced the overall experience of the course. The conference and my remarks on museum ethnology could have been completely askew, but in actuality there was, I think, an unusually good fit, with the topics that I raised in the initial sessions showing up in richer context in the presentations of ICME keynote speakers and presenters. The new exhibitions and new museum provided a great context for the course and the conference.

ICME is a group within the larger International Committee of Museums (ICOM). ICOM is the UNESCO-affiliated international organization promoting and supporting museums and museum work. ICME is one of the 30 International Committees active within ICOM. As the name suggests, its focus are museums of ethnography a conception that includes museums whose ethnographic collections and work are very local (such as community-specific museums), national and regional (such as the ENM) and those whose concerns are global in scope (such as the Mathers Museum of World Cultures). The meeting in Tartu at the ENM was the 51st ICME meeting and it was organized under the theme “Re-imaging the Museum in the Global Contemporary.” (Find information on the conference, including specific presentations here and here).

The ICME conference was presided over gracefully by ICME President Viv Golding (University of Leicester) and the hard working local organizational team was led by Agnes Aljas (Research Secretary at the ENM). Agnes in particular went to great lengths to facilitate my participation in the conference and I thank her for her kind efforts.

There were many excellent presentations throughout the conference and a range of meaningful special activities, Each day began with a keynote, all of which were rich and inspiring. The keynote speakers were Andrea Witcomb (Professor, Deakin University, Australia), Pille Runnel (Research Director, Estonian National Museum), Philipp Schorch (State Ethnographic Collection of Saxony, Germany) and Wayne Modest (Research Center for Material Culture, Netherlands).

ICME Group Photograph (ICME 2018)

Participants in the 2018 ICME meeting. From http://network.icom.museum/icme/, accessed November 1, 2018.

One contrast that I would highlight concerns the way that many of core conference presenters–as one might expect in Estonia as a Northern European host country–work in contemporary contexts shaped by volkskunde– or folklife-centered disciplinary histories (European ethnology, etc.). Their ethnographic concerns remained issues of commonality and difference inside (usually small) nation states. Nationalism is their main specter. With the exception of Pille Runnel from the ENM, whose valuable keynote took us behind the scenes at the host museum, the primary concerns of the other keynote speakers were more inflected towards volkerkunde (social anthropology, etc.) disciplinary histories or contexts. Whether overseas colonial projects or the dynamics of settler colonialism (in Australia), colonialism was the specter that haunted their remarks, even when focused on the problems of contemporary national cultures. This distinction was never complete and it is less so in places like modern Europe, but it remains present but not always acknowledged in our discussions. Discussions of projects with source communities, for instance, mean very different things in Berlin or Tartu. One could often feel audience members straining to connect the compelling suggestions made by keynote speakers to their own very different working contexts. I am always hyper sensitive to these dynamics working as a folklorist, ethnologist, and cultural anthropologist in a settler society that has vexing colonial (overseas and internal) circumstances as well as a difficult history of nation building in multicultural-but-unequal circumstances. This is a hard problem to solve because working knowledge of different disciplinary traditions and circumstances are so unevenly spread and widely-read and discussed work in English language museum anthropology has often overwhelmingly favored work in colonial situations over work arising from provincial and national ones.

These remarks are not in any way a criticism. A problem that I have long felt as a museum folklorist who is also a museum anthropologist (and as a teacher of folklore studies and of anthropology) were made still clearer for me in the ICME context. I hope that I can find new ways to help bridge the gap that I am evoking. International meetings where different perspectives and different national and global circumstances converge certainly help. I know that I am not alone in having learned much at the ICME meetings. I would not normally have been able to travel to an international meeting of this sort, thus my visit to Tartu was an extra-ordinary opportunity.

One last ENM note. The ENM stewards another museum site that I visited. As noted in my first post, I visited the Heimtali Museum of Domestic Life near Viljandi. My visit was excellent thanks to the work of my guides Kristi Jõeste and Ave Matsin of the Department of Estonian Native Craft and the kindness of our hostess And Raud. A textile artist, arts professor, and student of Estonian craft, costume and textiles, Ms. Raud founded the museum around her extensive collection. While it is now a branch of the ENM, the Ms. Raud remains the Heimtali Museum of Domestic Life’s greatest guide and interpreter. I thank her and Ave and Kristi for my visit.

My museum engagements in Estonia were inspirational and they will inform my teaching, research, and curatorial work for many years. I am fortunate to have had these opportunities and I thank all those who made them possible, including the Fulbright Specialist Program, the University of Tartu, and the Estonian National Museum.

Jan 24

CFP: Museum Anthropology Futures

On behalf of the Council for Museum Anthropology, I am happy to pass along the call for proposals for the Museum Anthropology Futures conference in Montreal this May. Find details below. (Quoted material follows, contact the organizers with questions or concerns.)

Call for Session Proposals: “Museum Anthropology Futures” Conference (due March 1)
Council for Museum Anthropology Inaugural Conference

May 25-27, 2017 at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The Council for Museum Anthropology is seeking submissions for its inaugural conference taking place in Montreal from May 25-27, 2017. This will not be your traditional conference experience! “Museum Anthropology Futures” seeks to spark critical reflection and discussion on (1) the state of museum anthropology as an academic discipline; (2) innovative methods for the use of collections; (3) exhibition experiments that engage with anthropological research; and (4) museums as significant sites for grappling with pressing social concerns such as immigration, inequality, racism, colonial legacies, heritage preservation, cultural identities, representation, and creativity as productive responses to these.

The conference will have several sessions each day that all participants will attend, as well as one period each day with breakout sessions like workshops and formats that would benefit from a more intimate setting for dialogue and collaboration.
We are seeking session proposals that are different than the usual call for papers – see session descriptions below. Feel free to email us with questions at museumfutures2017@gmail.com.

Updates available at our Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/MuseumFutures/

Email your session proposal to museumfutures2017@gmail.com by March 1, 2017

Please provide the following information in your email text, no attachment:

1) Your name, title, home institution (if applicable), and email address
2) Your proposed session format (see below)
3) The title of your session
4) Additional session participants if a group submission (title and email address)
5) A description of your session (max 150 words) Specific requirements for each format below.
6) What you hope to achieve in presenting/participating in this session (1-3 sentences)
7) What you believe this session can contribute to museum futures (1-3 sentences)
***Please note: Some Workshops and Pre-circulated Paper sessions will be by registration only due to limited capacity. All other sessions are open to all conference participants. For example, Roundtable or PechaKucha sessions will have several presenters who discuss their work, and the audience attending the session is invited to listen and ask questions or give feedback.***

SESSION FORMATS
Read more

Oct 8

Seeking Applicants | Museums at the Crossroads: Local Knowledge, Global Encounters

Call for Applications (Deadline Nov. 15)

Museums at the Crossroads:  Local Knowledge, Global Encounters

A Summer Institute of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and the School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University

Bloomington, Indiana, USA
May 14-21, 2015

The Indiana University Mathers Museum of World Cultures and School of Global and International Studies invite applications for up to eight Museum Partners who will take part in an innovative international workshop on the future of museums of culture and history.

Museums at the Crossroads, scheduled for May 14-21, 2015, in the beautiful college town of Bloomington, Indiana, combines keynote addresses, tours, charrettes, and social interactions. We seek applications from museum practitioners and theorists who wish to partner in conversation and creative practice with a group of invited keynote speakers and international museum fellows in a small, informal workshop setting.  Successful applicants will receive eight nights of on-campus lodging and per diem support of $45 for eight days.

About Museums at the Crossroads

Museums at the Crossroads connects theory and practice, bridging institutional, regional, and national museum contexts in order to advance the global conversation around museums and generate a range of practical outcomes for its participants.

Workshop participants will include:

•    4 international fellows from innovative museums around the globe
•    8 museum partners drawn from museums and other institutions in the United States and abroad
•    12 Indiana University faculty, staff, and graduate students
•    4 keynote speakers, each addressing a broader social and cultural theme that we wish to explore in depth in museum contexts.

Our keynote speakers are:

•    Steven Lubar, Brown University (keynote on Today’s Museum:  Innovation, Change, and Challenge)
•    Michael F. Brown, School for Advanced Research (keynote on Cultural Crossroads:  World Cultures in Transition)
•    Stephan Fuchs, University of Virginia (keynote on Disciplinary Crossroads:  The Evolving Sociology of Knowledge)
•    Haidy Geismar, University College London (keynote on Artifactual Crossroads:  Real Meets Virtual)

Museum Partners will be responsible for their own travel arrangements to and from Bloomington, Indiana, and are expected to participate actively in the full workshop and in associated follow-on activities. Prior to attending, each shall develop an institutional profile that includes an account of challenges your museum faces relative to the three “crossroads” (Cultural, Disciplinary, Artifactual) being explored in the workshop. Partners without a museum affiliation will be asked to prepare a comparable position paper on the themes.

How to Apply

To apply for a position as Museum Partner, please send a resume or curriculum vitae, as well as a cover letter expressing your interest, as a PDF email attachment to:

Sarah Hatcher, c/o mxrd@indiana.edu.

Review of applications will begin November 15, 2014, with applicants receiving notifications by December 15, 2014.

Further Information

For additional detail on the scope and nature of Museums at the Crossroads, see the workshop précis, which is accessible online at: http://www.mathers.indiana.edu/crossroads.html.

Additional information about Indiana University Bloomington can be found at: http://iub.edu/.

Information on the Mathers Museum of World Cultures is available at: http://mathers.indiana.edu/.

Questions about the workshop can be addressed to the organizers at: mxrd@indiana.edu.

Sep 17

A Museum-Minded Guide to the 2014 American Folklore Society Meetings

Cross-posted from AFS News.

Folklorists with an interest in museums are feeling quite excited about the upcoming American Folklore Society annual meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico (November 5-8, 2014). The home to many world-class museums, Santa Fe is always a favorite with museum lovers, whether they are enthusiastic avocational visitors or veteran museum workers. This year, Santa Fe’s wonderful museums compete for our attention with an AFS meeting program that is unusually broad and deep in its engagement with museums as rich sites for collaboration, education, and community empowerment as well as for ethnographic, historical, and comparative research. If your plans are not yet finalized, please consider joining us in Santa Fe.

For those with museum interests, there are too many wonderful panels and presentations to enumerate all of them here. Many material culture panels—covering everything from food ways to architecture—appear throughout the program and will certainly attract the attention of museum-minded folklorists. The same can be said for public folklore programming and other themes of perennial concern. Here I highlight a selection of promising events of likely interest to those eager to learn more about the intersection of folklore studies and museum practices. This account though is just a selection drawn from the larger program and I know that much wonderful work of museum-interest is not flagged here. The Santa Fe program will provide a near infinite number of options for all of us.

Before the meetings even officially open, an abundance of museum-relevant offerings on Wednesday will get us in the mood for a jam-packed program. While the rich set of tour choices have understandably attracted many in the museums crowd, some museum folklorists have understandably been drawn to the “Experiments in Exhibition Workshop” that has been organized by Carrie Hertz and Suzanne Seriff at the Museum of International Folk Art. This innovative hands-on gathering has been sponsored by the Museum of International Folk Art, the AFS Folklore and Museum Policy and Practice Working Group, the Folklore and Education Section, and Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education.

The Experiments in Exhibition Workshop is only one of a number of special events connected to our hosts at the Museum of International Folk Art. Kicking off the meeting’s panel sessions on Thursday morning, is a double session on “Pottery of the US South” that will offer a diversity of viewpoints on a topic that is the focus of the museum’s special exhibition of the same name. Those attending the exhibition’s opening later on Thursday may wish to attend one or both of these companion panels [01-01, 02-01].

Also in the first time slot on Thursday is Dress, Culture, and Identity: Museum Collections and Outreach, which has been sponsored by the Folklore and Education Section [01-04]. For those with museum interests, difficult choices or shuttling between rooms will be a welcome challenge throughout the meetings.

Running alongside the second pottery panel in the second slot on Thursday is the first of a series of museum-focused panels organized by the Folklore and Museum Policy and Practice Working Group. Leading off the working group’s series is a forum in which group members will update the membership on its work and solicit questions, concerns, and contributions from the field in anticipation of a final working group white paper and a range of spin off publications—all of which will aim to strengthen understanding of, and opportunities in, museum-based folklore studies [02-04]. The series of panels organized by the working group all aim to facilitate the sharing of innovative case studies and hard won experience throughout, and beyond, the field. Please join the conversation.

After lunch on Thursday, a second working group event will be held—a diamond session on “Current Digital Projects in Ethnographic Museum Contexts” [03-04]. This panel runs concurrently with “Folk Art, Folk Craft I”, which also includes presentations of special relevance to those with museum interests [03-17].

A highpoint of the conference will happen on Thursday evening, from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. This is when the “Open House on Museum Hill” will be held. All of the Museum of International Folk Art and Museum of Indian Arts and Culture galleries and gift shops will be open and attendees will have the unique opportunity of seeing a performance by the Cibecue Creek Apache Crown Dancers. Check your program for details on other musical and exhibition offerings, as well as shuttle information. There are many great choices lined up and we will also be able to indulge in diverse fare with food trucks providing local and international foods for purchase.

Among the many museum scholars attending AFS for the first time is Aaron Glass of the Bard Graduate Center. On Thursday evening, following the events on Museum Hill, Glass will be screening “In the Land of the Head Hunters: A Newly Restored Version of Edward S. Curtis’s 1914 Silent Film Made with the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) of British Columbia.” This special event should have wide appeal to all who have heard of Curtis’ famous work or who have interests in archives, Native American culture, community collaboration, or visual methods and productions.

Museum-focused panels begin again on Friday with “Movement Creates Museum: Activist Beginnings of Historic Sites of Conscience” [04-01], which runs concurrently with “Archives, Museums, Collections I” [04-08]. These two panels are followed by another museums working group event: “At the Crossroads of Museums and the Marketplace” [05-03].

After lunch on Friday, hard choices continue with “Archives, Museums, and Collections II” [06-03] running concurrently with another panel with much museum content—the diamond session “People and Things: Material Culture Research at the Crossroads” [06-05].

A further museums working group event kicks off Saturday morning: “At the Crossroads of Museums and Communities” [07-01]. This event is followed by “At the Crossroads of Folklore and Museum Education” [08-05], which has been sponsored by the Folklore and Education Section.

In the conference’s final time slot for presentations, museum-relevant papers appear in “The Crossroads Are Owned: Folklore Institutions and the Negotiation of Public and Personal Tradition” [09-07], which runs concurrently with the final event of the museums working group series. It is: “Museums and Intangible Heritage: Connecting the Tangible with the Intangible” [09-16] as well as a panel discussion grounded in the work of the Museum of International Folk Art’s Gallery of Conscience initiative: “Community Crossroads: Integrating Folk Art, Media, and Youth to Impact HIV/AIDS Advocacy” [09-03].

Among the special features of the Santa Fe meetings will be the presence of many first-time attendees who are museum colleagues from China and the United States. Their attendance follows from the work of the joint China Folklore Society-American Folklore Society project focused on folklore and intangible cultural heritage (ICH). The current, second phase of this Luce Foundation-funded effort is focused on museums and ICH policies in both countries. For those interested in learning more about the current “Intangible Cultural Heritage and Ethnographic Museum Practice” project as well as the broader “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project” can find details on the AFS website.

As suggested above, this year’s museums-rich program has also attracted first-time attendees and guests from neighboring fields sharing our museum interests, including cultural anthropology and Native American studies. I would like to encourage all AFS regulars to welcome and connect with these many new AFS meeting participants. As always, AFS will also attract many students. This year will provide them with an unusually rich opportunity to learn about museum-based folklore practice and to engage with colleagues, projects, institutions, and ideas in the wider museum field.

Thanks to all who have worked hard to assemble such a rich set of events and scholarly presentations for the Santa Fe meetings.

Sep 6

Bourke-White Exhibition Opening

Congratulations to exhibition curator Alex Lichtenstein on the very successful opening, this evening, of “Photos in Black and White: Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid in South Africa.” More than 130 students, community members, photography enthusiasts, faculty members, Mathers Museum boosters, and Mellon Innovating International Research, Teaching and Collaboration (MIIRT) conference participants converged on the MMWC from 4 to 6 pm today to see, and learn from, Alex’s exhibition, to discuss South Africa, past and present, and to hear from Alex and two special guests from South Africa–Dudu Madonsela, Chief Curator at the Bensusan Museum of Photography in Johannesburg, and leading contemporary photographer Cedric Nunn. Thanks to everyone who participated in the opening and who lent support to the exhibition and its associated activities.

If you missed the opening, or just want to go further with it, you can check out the companion website, attend the upcoming symposium or film series, and, for the truly ambitious, see the exhibition when it travels to South Africa next year. The exhibition can, of course, be seen at the MMWC throughout the rest of 2013.

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