Date and Location: 1st-3rd JUNE 2018 @ The Clore Centre, British Museum
Informal enquiries may be made to admin@therai.org.uk
Call for panels opens on 21 April 2017 and closes on 30 June 2017
Call for papers opens on 29 August 2017 and closes on 8 January 2018
Registration opens on 22 February 2018
Conference Fee: Non-Fellow: £190 | RAI Member: £170 | RAI Fellow: £95 | Concessions: £80 | RAI Student Fellow: £60
Emma Martin (University of Manchester), Trine Brox (University of Copenhagen), Chair Dr Diana Lange (Humboldt University, Berlin), Discussant Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen (University of Copenhagen)
Focusing on the theme of materiality, and knowledge production and exchange in the field, this discussion-based workshop seeks papers that address and privilege the importance of visual and material culture in knowing and negotiating people and places.
The European ethnographic museum is widely understood as an important site of colonial knowledge production, where objects and images were/are put to work to create essentialising tropes for peoples and their material culture. Yet as Ter Keurs (2007) makes clear these institutions tell us far less about the actual moment of collection or exchange and the ways in which material- and visual-based knowledge was produced and negotiated in the field, both by collectors of ethnographic objects and their interlocutors. Our concern is not with the material and visual representations of peoples, objects and images produced in the museum. It is rather with the ways researching ethnographic museum collections allows for a revisiting and re-narration of both colonial-era collecting and knowledge production practices.
Focusing on the theme of materiality, and knowledge production and exchange in the field, this discussion-based workshop seeks papers that address and privilege the importance of objects and images in knowing and negotiating people and places. Using the framework of knowledge production, displacement, loss and its potential recovery we are particularly concerned with the transformation of knowledge and how it travelled (or not) with the objects and images it was produced for. We wish to include a range of voices, including academic researchers, museum curators, sources communities, and those who acted as interlocutors. We are especially interested in papers that address the processes of collaborative working using museum collections and archives, as well as those that propose new theoretical frameworks for understanding such material encounters.