CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
The 2A Magazine Spring 2010 issue #13 focusses on Museums of and in the
Middle East
Museums of the Middle East
[Muses of the Orient]
Museums at the beginnings of the western world were temples to the Muses,
the nine young goddesses who presided over the arts, literature and the
sciences. Early museums began as private collections of individuals and
institutions housing objects of scientific, artistic or historical
importance for public viewing through exhibits. In the museum, the object,
in many cases removed in time, place and circumstance from its original
context, becomes a communicative tool that represents the past and its
significance in relation to the present. This representation makes the
museum a unique place, a hybrid space of diverse outcomes that distinguish
content from surface.
Yet museum architecture is the new 21st century cultural enterprise,
branding, corporate entities and big business. This museum-mania has lifted
the role of the museum from a collection of artifacts to sensationalism,
spectacle and the Bilbao effect. Issue#13 of 2A magazine will map the
current state of culture, the role of the museum and the making of
institutions as spaces to accommodate art and culture in the Middle East.
These organizations bring about a new and innovative 'urban abstraction'
and create new challenges and contradictions for the region: east vs. west,
high vs. popular taste, orientalism vs. modernism, colonialism vs. national
identity, censorship vs. participation, authenticity vs. reenactment,
identity vs. multiplicity.
The plethora of developments over the last ten years in the Middle East has
resulted in generating new and dynamic urban conditions and it is now
shifting to 'culture'. This has brought about a renewed interest for the
construction of institutions for art, architecture, history, heritage and
performance.
Contributors to the magazine may consider one or more of the following
themes relevant to building cultural institutions of the 21st century
Museums as Branding
Museums as Education
Museums as Architectural spaces
Museums as Art
Museums as Metropolitan hubs
Museums as Representation
Museums as Participation
Museums as Public spaces
Museums as Knowledge
Museums as Identity
Museums as Community and Regional Relevance
Museums as Private Collections
Museums as Archiving Culture
Call for submissions
The guest editors of issue #13 of 2A would like to invite submissions of
original research, essays, critical text, art works and presentations of
museums as well as art and cultural institutions of the Middle East:
architectural, urban, cultural, historical and social.
Guest Editors
George Katodrytis (Associate Professor of Architecture at the American
University of Sharjah, UAE)
Susanne Weiss (Museologist and Curator, Sharjah and Berlin)
Dr. Negar Hakim (Art Historian, Vienna, Austria)
Submission date
Full article submissions (text and high resolution images): 1 March 2010
Article length: maximum 3000 words
Submission format and email
All text to be in MS Word format and all images in jpeg format to:
info@2amagazine.com and gkatodrytis@aus.edu
The 2A magazine ( www.2amagazine.com ) will be published in spring 2010.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
CFP: Museums of the Middle East
Monday, February 08, 2010
Museum Education Newsletter
Are you currently researching or evaluating any aspect of museum education
or interpretation? Do you know someone who is?
If so, MUSEUM EDUCATION MONITOR (MEM), the monthly e-newsletter, would like
to list the work in our upcoming February 2010 issue. We welcome listings by
museum workers, consultants, faculty, and students at all levels of study.
To assist these research efforts, MEM continues to offer a free introductory
one-year subscription to any student in a museum education-related course or
program. Complimentary subscriptions are also available to those museum
educators who are currently unwaged. Visit
http://www.mccastle.com/Public/MEM.aspx for details.
To share research or evaluation with others around the world, please send an
e-mail to mem@mccastle.com that includes:
- name of project
- question(s) [no more than 50 words, please]
- how the data will be presented
- principal researcher(s)/ evaluator(s)
- site(s) where research is being conducted
- time span
- contact information
- key words/labels to describe the project [no more than 4 or 5, please].
For possible labels from past listings, see the MEM blog, "FORUM:
Research and Resources in Museum Education" at http://forum.mccastle.com/
All listings are free of charge and displayed in their language of
origin. Deadline for the February MEM is Friday, February 19.
FYI, research listings in the January 2010 MEM include:
- Museum Activity Guides (USA)
- More Than A Meal: The Impact of Museum Dining on the Visitor's Museum
Experience (USA)
- Science Museum: Collecting Stories Project (UK)
- plus updates on a score of recent theses and dissertations!
Contact me at chris@mccastle.com to request a complimentary copy of this
issue.
Please get in touch for more information about this call or to discuss your
research. I look forward to hearing from you!
M. Christine Castle, Editor, Museum Education Monitor
mem@mccastle.com
For more information about Museum Education Monitor or to subscribe see
http://www.mccastle.com
Aussie Aussie Aussie!
Museums Australia 2010 National Conference 28 Sep-2 Oct 2010 at The University of Melbourne
On behalf of the Program Committee of the 14th annual Museums Australia National Conference, we invite you to submit an abstract in response to our call for papers. The Conference will offer a range of plenary and concurrent sessions, presentations, break-outs and panel forums relating to the theme Interesting Times: New Roles for Collections. Topics cover a wide range of discussion from Collections in communities, cultural diplomacy, collections and commerce, creativity, language and collections in peril.
Abstracts may be no more than 250 words and may optionally be peer-reviewed. The Call for Abstracts will close Monday 1 March 2010. For more information and details of suggested sub-themes, go to: www.ma2010.com.au/abstracts.asp
Family Tickets for All (and a chance to be a spy)
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Andrew Wulf wanted to let the community know that he was proud to represent the School of Museum Studies Department when he gave a paper last month at the "Culture and International History IV" conference in Koln, Germany. There's a link to the conference, organized by Jessica Gienow- Hecht, here: http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/content/articles/events/caihIV/culture_and_international_history_IV_program.pdf. Andrew tells me that his paper will become a large section or perhaps the main focus of his dissertation. It's title is: "American Attempts at Cultural Diplomacy through International Exhibitions during the Reagan Presidency, 1981-1989." Thanks Andrew for this information!
Wah wah, nobody loves the BM
Iran has a hissy fit about the delay of a loan: The first "bill of rights", cuneiform edition.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
CFP: ICME ICOM
Museums for Social Harmony
7 to 12 November 2010
Shanghai, China
Website: http://icme.icom.museum/
Contact name: Annette B. Fromm
The theme for ICOM 2010 is Museums for Social Harmony - different approaches to the concept of harmony and invites to examinations of how museums can contribute to processes that are important for the development of societies
Organized by: International Committee of Museums of Ethnography
Deadline for abstracts/proposals: 31 April 2010
CFP: Thinking About 'Things' (TAT): Interdisciplinary Futures in Material Culture
Thinking About 'Things' (TAT): Interdisciplinary Futures in Material Culture
10 to 12 May 2010
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Website: http://www.tat2010.com
Contact name: Sarah Conrad Gothie
An international and interdisciplinary graduate student conference designed to explore material culture and the ways in which we create it, interact with it, use it, discard it, and study it.
Organized by: University of Michigan
Deadline for abstracts/proposals: 20 February 2010
Staffordshire Hoard: Urgent Appeal
The Art Fund has launched a £3.3 million drive to secure the Staffordshire Hoard for the nation:
If we fail to reach £3.3 million by 17 April 2010, the treasure will be returned to the finder and the landowner and could end up being sold on the open market.
...some of the smallest fragments are valued at just £20. Each of us could save one such piece. Together we can save it all.
Leicester's historic buildings at risk
Friday, February 05, 2010
New Leicester Publication: Re-Presenting Disability
Re-Presenting Disability
Activism and Agency in the Museum
Edited by Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
List Price: £23.99
ISBN: 978-0-415-49473-1
Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
Published by: Routledge
Publication Date: 27/01/2010
Pages: 304
About the Book
Re-Presenting Disability addresses issues surrounding disability representation in museums and galleries, a topic which is receiving much academic attention and is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for practitioners working in wide-ranging museums and related cultural organisations.
This volume of provocative and timely contributions, brings together twenty researchers, practitioners and academics from different disciplinary, institutional and cultural contexts to explore issues surrounding the cultural representation of disabled people and, more particularly, the inclusion (as well as the marked absence) of disability-related narratives in museum and gallery displays. The diverse perspectives featured in the book offer fresh ways of interrogating and understanding contemporary representational practices as well as illuminating existing, related debates concerning identity politics, social agency and organisational purposes and responsibilities, which have considerable currency within museums and museum studies.
Re-Presenting Disability explores such issues as:
In what ways have disabled people and disability-related topics historically been represented in the collections and displays of museums and galleries? How can newly emerging representational forms and practices be viewed in relation to these historical approaches?
How do emerging trends in museum practice – designed to counter prejudiced, stereotypical representations of disabled people – relate to broader developments in disability rights, debates in disability studies, as well as shifting interpretive practices in public history and mass media?
What approaches can be deployed to mine and interrogate existing collections in order to investigate histories of disability and disabled people and to identify material evidence that might be marshalled to play a part in countering prejudice? What are the implications of these developments for contemporary collecting?
How might such purposive displays be created and what dilemmas and challenges are curators, educators, designers and other actors in the exhibition-making process, likely to encounter along the way?
How do audiences – disabled and non-disabled – respond to and engage with interpretive interventions designed to confront, undercut or reshape dominant regimes of representation that underpin and inform contemporary attitudes to disability?
Table of Contents
Part 1: New Ways of Seeing 1. Activist Practice Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd 2. Picturing People with Disabilities: Classical Portraiture as Reconstructive Narrative Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 3. Agents at Angkor Lain Hart 4. See No Evil Victoria Phiri 5. Ghosts in the War Museum Ana Carden-Coyne 6. Behind the Shadow of Merrick David Hevey 7. Disability Reframed: Challenging Visitor Perceptions in the Museum Jocelyn Dodd, Ceri Jones, Debbie Jolly and Richard Sandell Part 2: Interpretive Journeys and Experiments 8. To Label the Label? ‘Learning Disability’ and Exhibiting ‘Critical Proximity’ Helen Graham 9. Hurting and Healing: Reflections on Representing Mental Illness in Museums. Jo Besley and Carol Low 10. Histories of Disability and Medicine: Reconciling Historical Narratives and Contemporary Values Julie Anderson and Lisa O’Sullivan 11. Revealing Moments: Representations of Disability and Sexuality Elizabeth Mariko Murray and Sarah Jacobs 12. The Red Wheelchair in the White Snowdrift Geraldine Chimirri-Russell 13. Face to Face: Exhibiting and Interpreting Facial Disfigurement in a Museum Context Emma Chambers Part 3: Unsettling Practices 14. ‘Out from Under’: A Brief History of Everything. Kathryn Church, Melanie Panitch, Catherine Frazee and Phaedra Livingstone 15. Transforming Practice: Disability Perspectives and the Museum Shari Rosenstein Werb and Tari Hartman Squire 16. Reciprocity, Accountability, Empowerment: Emancipatory Principles and Practices in the Museum Heather Hollins 17. Disability, Human Rights and the Public Gaze: the Losheng Story Museum Chia-Li Chen 18. A Museum for All? The Norwegian Museum of Deaf History and Culture Hanna Mellemsether 19. Collective Bodies: What Museums do for Disability Studies. Katherine Ott
Thursday, February 04, 2010
The darker side of museum work
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Petition
Further to my post regarding the funding cuts, here is a petition to save the Chair of Paleography at KCL
Save Paleography
Sign if you would like to!
Probling the Boundaries: Making Sense of Madness Conference
A Global Network for Dynamic Research and Publishing
Call for Papers
3rd Global Conference
madnessheader9
Tuesday 14th September – Thursday 16th September 2010
Oriel College, Oxford
This inter-disciplinary research conference seeks to explore issues of madness across historical periods and within cultural, political and social contexts. We are also interested in exploring the place of madness in persons and interpersonal relationships and across a range of critical perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand the place of madness in the constitution of persons, relationships and the complex interlacing of self and other.
In particular papers, workshops, presentations and pre-formed panel proposals are invited on any of the following themes:
1. The Value of Madness or Why is it that We Need Madness?
~ Critical explorations: beyond madness/sanity/insanity
~ Continuity and difference: always with us yet never quite the same
~ Repetition and novelty: the incessant emergence and re-emergence of madness
~ Profound attraction and desire; fear of the abyss and the radical unknown
~ Naming, defining and understanding the elusive
2. The Passion of Madness or Madness and the Emotions
~ Love as madness; uncontrollable passion; unrestrainable love
~ Passion and love as a remaking of life and self
~ Gender and madness; the feminine and the masculine
~ Anger, resentment, revenge, hate, evil
~ I would rather vomit, thank you; revulsion, badness and refusing to comply
3. The Boundaries of Madness or Resisting Normality
~ Madness, sanity and the insane
~ Being out of your mind, crazy, deranged … yet, perfectly sane
~ Deviating from the normal; defining the self against the normal
~ Control, self-control and the pull of the abyss
~ When the insane becomes normal; when evil reins social life
4. Lunatics and the Asylum or Power and the Politics of Madness
~ The social allure and fear of madness; the institutions of confining mad people
~ Servicing normality by castigating the insane and marginalizing lunatics
~ Medicine, psychiatry, psychology, law and the constructions of madness; madness as illness
~ Contributions of the social sciences to the making and the critique of the making of madness
~ Representations, explanations and the critique of madness from the humanities and the arts
5. Creativity, Critique and Cutting Edge
~ Madness as genius, outstanding, out of the ordinary, spectacularly brilliant
~ The art of madness; the science of madness
~ Music, painting, dance, theater: it is crazy to think of art without madness
~ The language and communication of madness: who can translate?
~ Creation as an unfolding of madness
6. Unrestrained and Boundless or The Liberating Promise of Madness
~ Metaphors of feeling free, unrestrained, capable, lifted from reality
~ Madness as clear-sightedness, as opening up possibilities, as re-visioning of the world
~ The future, the prophetic, the unknown; the epic, the heroic and the tragic
~ The unreachable and untouchable knowledge of madness
~ The insanity of not loving madness
7. Lessons for Self and Other or Lessons for Life about and from Madness
~ Cultural and social constructions of madness; images of the mad, crazy, insane, lunatic, abnormal
~ What is real? Who defines reality? Learning from madness how to cope with reality
~ Recognising madness in oneself; relativising madness in others
~ Love, intimacy, care and the small spaces of madness
~ Critical and ethical implosions of normality and normalness; sane in insane places and insane in sane places
Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes.
The 2010 meeting of Madness will run alongside our project on Villains and Villainy and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues of Mad Villains, Madness and Villainy and related themes.
Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 26th March 2010. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 13th August 2010.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract
E-mails should be entitled: Madness Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
* Gonzalo Araoz
University of Cumbria, Cumbria, United Kingdom
E-mail: Gonzalo Araoz
.
* Maria Vaccarella
Hub Leader, Making Sense Of: and Marie Curie Research Fellow, King’s College, London
E-mail: Maria Vaccarella
.
* Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
E-mail: Rob Fisher
The conference is part of the ‘Making Sense Of:’ series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Brown Bag Seminar
Dr Louise Govier "Leaders in Co-Creation: Why and How Museum Could Develop Their Co-Creative Practive with the Public, Building on Ideas from the Performing Arts and Other Non-Museum Organisations"
Dr Govier is the MLA's Clore Leadership Fellow. Her research has been focused around the problems museums face in terms of 'co-creation', and what they can learn from other sectors about co-creation.
Firstly, what do we mean by co-creation? There are various definitions, but it comes under the wider trend of working with the public and how we can engage with them. As far as museums are concerned, there still remain many definitions.
Nina Simon has defined four terms of participation - contribution, collaboration, co-creation and co-option. Though these ideas are similar, they do differ. Partly this is about understanding where the power relationships lie within museums. In the first two, the power lies with the museum - they define the space and the parameters within which the project functions. In the latter two, the space belongs to the community. But when Dr Govier talks about co-creation, she means a combination of collaboration and co-creation - power is important, but here the research does not focus on this. The main point, for her, is to make something that is of benefit to all interested parties.
At the MLA conference in October 2008, Dr Govier became aware of a number of problems - people were not really engaging in the debates surrounding participation. Many people had concerns - many were afraid of the idea - but they didn't feel able to present their points for risk of sounding non-PC. More and more work is coming out all the time, but there still needs to be more work, especially in terms of how the reality does in fact match the reality. Often these projects, however brilliant, are limited in scope - to the community and to be purely ABOUT the community, as if this was all they had to contribute. Often the location of these projects are very limited - or they are kept online. This means that often projects cannot be found, or that they do not make any real impact upon the museum space.
Many people also voiced serious problems in actually managing this on a practical level. There are always, of course, issues regarding expectation on the part of the communities and the staff of museums. Often 'leadership' is brought into the debate, which ends up, often, with the issue just getting passed on and on and never getting resolved.
The advantages of the Clore leadership programme is that you get to work with other institutions to learn lessons. So Dr Govier began to ask how these other cultural forms could contribute to the understanding and development of the co-creation principle, and how these ideas might be marketed to the individuals within museums.
Her first stop was, surprisingly, business literature on collective creativity. There is an extensive amount of work that shows that groups can produce better results than individuals - and there is, after all, the continuing proliferation of co-created websites such as Wikipedia and products such as Linux. When that creative pool is extended to the public, the public can design their own products, and they are therefore more engaged with them. Those audiences may provide ideas that had not previously been thought of. This seems a good basis to work with museums who are lacking in community engagement.
Leadership theory provided another starting point, especially with regard to the leadership qualities we need now, in this changing world of increasing 'collective creativity'. How do you support those self selected groups of people in creating an idea, how do you find them, how do you create the environment where collectives can arise, and then how can you harness their power - and stop it being scary? Collaboration is always an issue. Moving projects forward is often difficult, and we need to work out what leadership qualities are needed for that. Overall, the conclusions seem to have suggested that there needs to be a leader, someone who can maintain a framework within which creativity can flourish. A call for creativitiy and co-creation needs to recognise the strengths and the weaknesses of various participants in order that everyone can be valued for what they provide. The audience wanted to gain from the museum's expertise, and the museum often needs to maintain the protected status of objects.
Many projects have been successful in the performing arts - what can museums learn from their work? Dr Govier conducted three case studies - Dance United, which co-creates productions with a variety of non-dancers, specifically their production of 'Destino' with Sadler's Wells; Birmingham Opera Company who produce only using non-professionals in non-conventional theatres in Birmingham; and Theatre Royal Stratford East, who hands over the artistic programming to the community.
Learning why you want to engage in co-creation is critical. Is it about social inclusion? Audience development? Diversity development? A sense of entrepreneurship? Personal reasons? The appreciation of the abilities of non-professionals? Ultimately, their aims were to create great art. This is essential to the success of a project. What's the point in engaging if you don't allow people to produce something great? Why you desire to commence such programmes deeply influences the way in which you do it.
How did these companies manage risk? Some people took a very hands-off approach, and some took a stronger creative lead - and in many cases, the latter is more successful. Self awareness, the awareness of other people and the situation is crucial.
What does this mean for museums? We need leadership throughout the museum workforce, at the top and at a project level. Co-creation doesn't mean no leadership - we need a flexible approach to leadership, which uses situation specific understanding in order to respond appropriately. This means being clear about aims and objectives. Often in museums it is assumed that co-creation is all about social inclusion. But this is overly restrictive - what about co-creating for creating great art, and great museums? Museums need to recognise their ability as creative artists and embrace it. We need to understand the benefits, tangible and intangible, that collective work can bring.
Good luck to you all! Now go forth and create!!!
Dr Govier can be contacted at louise.govier@yahoo.co.uk
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