Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology

10/13/2021

Second Seminar in the Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology & Museums is up.....

Remembering through Things, Encountering Objects and
Kin in the Museum
Thursday, October 21, 2021 -- 1 PM (EST)
RVSP: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__88nKyaPSBmGyJV3ku1eqA

Museums are places of encounter. Many house vast collections of rare or typical minerals, plants, animals, or cultural materials from across the globe. Yet these things originate from populated landscapes, and source communities often have enduring connections to these removed items. For Indigenous communities, collected ‘things’ may in fact be ancestors, or otherwise known as kin and imbued with ancestral presences. In recent decades there has been a growing acknowledgement of the rights of source communities to access, engage with, and determine the fate of collections. Engagement projects have proliferated, aiming to provide space for new encounters between communities and objects from their homelands and seek ways to address long-standing inequalities. In this discussion we unpack some of these meetings between people and things and ask: what memories are triggered by seeing, touching, holding, and speaking with objects? What new knowledges and interpretations are generated through these complex interactions? Are object encounters affirming and joyful, or do they evoke traumatic memories of removal, violent pasts, and distance? Our discussion will explore some of these encounters and what they can teach us about the future of museum work.

A conversation between: Gaye Sculthorpe (Head of Oceania, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum), Jami Powell (Hood Museum of Art, Curator of Indigenous art and Lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department at Dartmouth College), and Chris Urwin (Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History).

Introduced by: Joshua Bell (Curator of Globalization at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History)

Please note: live closed captions will be available at this event.

Second Seminar in the Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology & Museums is up.....

Remembering through Things, Encountering Objects and
Kin in the Museum
Thursday, October 21, 2021 -- 1 PM (EST)
RVSP: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__88nKyaPSBmGyJV3ku1eqA

Museums are places of encounter. Many house vast collections of rare or typical minerals, plants, animals, or cultural materials from across the globe. Yet these things originate from populated landscapes, and source communities often have enduring connections to these removed items. For Indigenous communities, collected ‘things’ may in fact be ancestors, or otherwise known as kin and imbued with ancestral presences. In recent decades there has been a growing acknowledgement of the rights of source communities to access, engage with, and determine the fate of collections. Engagement projects have proliferated, aiming to provide space for new encounters between communities and objects from their homelands and seek ways to address long-standing inequalities. In this discussion we unpack some of these meetings between people and things and ask: what memories are triggered by seeing, touching, holding, and speaking with objects? What new knowledges and interpretations are generated through these complex interactions? Are object encounters affirming and joyful, or do they evoke traumatic memories of removal, violent pasts, and distance? Our discussion will explore some of these encounters and what they can teach us about the future of museum work.

A conversation between: Gaye Sculthorpe (Head of Oceania, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum), Jami Powell (Hood Museum of Art, Curator of Indigenous art and Lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department at Dartmouth College), and Chris Urwin (Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History).

Introduced by: Joshua Bell (Curator of Globalization at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History)

Please note: live closed captions will be available at this event.

10/07/2021

Just a reminder that 6pm EST the first of the Putting Theory and Things Together seminars will begin. Registration link is below and this event will be recorded for later distribution.

Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology & Museums
Presented by the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology

Interventions:
Museums, Anthropology and their Publics

Thursday, October 7, 2021 -- 6 PM
RVSP: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_URDRb03iTt6tRBxuYodIfQ

Despite deep colonial legacies, museums can also be sites of interventions that illuminate obscured histories for expanded publics. Increasingly, diversely-positioned researchers in and outside museums are engaging collections and collaborating with source communities to create public-facing works, including film screenings at festivals, art installations, performances, temporary exhibits, and symposia presentations. Emerging through collaborative labor, these events create opportunities for diverse publics to convene. While not without their own risks, these interventions possess a range of dynamics: How do researchers and other creators from within and outside museums shape these works and the events where museum visitors and staff experience them? How are they organized to reframe or create dialogue with more permanent exhibits in a museum? How do these ephemeral events create spaces for potentially new and changing publics to engage with museum objects and ethnographic work, as well as with histories of power, representation, continuities and discontinuities, and the movements of people and objects?

SPEAKERS
Jilda Andrews is an Indigenous cultural practitioner and museum anthropologist based in Canberra, Australia. Currently a Research Fellow with the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia, Jilda draws from her Yuwaalaraay heritage to investigate the connectedness of land, story and culture in museum collections. Jilda is interested in the dialogue between historical ethnography and contemporary cultural expression, and how these conversations can shine new light on contemporary museum work.

Aaron Glass is an Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center. His research focuses on First Nations visual art, material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North America, as well as the history of anthropology, museums, and ethnographic representation. Glass’s most recent book is Writing the Hamat’sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance (2021).

Jacqueline Hazen is a postdoctoral fellow at NMNH where she is mapping the museum's diverse collections from Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia. In addition to carrying out long-term fieldwork on Pohnpei and Guam for her PhD at New York University, she filmed, edited, and produced Island to Island, a short documentary made with practitioners of traditional Hawaiian chant living in New York City.

This seminar will be held virtually, will be recorded and be made available online.

09/28/2021

Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology & Museums
Presented by the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology

Interventions:
Museums, Anthropology and their Publics

Thursday, October 7, 2021 -- 6 PM
RVSP: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_URDRb03iTt6tRBxuYodIfQ

Despite deep colonial legacies, museums can also be sites of interventions that illuminate obscured histories for expanded publics. Increasingly, diversely-positioned researchers in and outside museums are engaging collections and collaborating with source communities to create public-facing works, including film screenings at festivals, art installations, performances, temporary exhibits, and symposia presentations. Emerging through collaborative labor, these events create opportunities for diverse publics to convene. While not without their own risks, these interventions possess a range of dynamics: How do researchers and other creators from within and outside museums shape these works and the events where museum visitors and staff experience them? How are they organized to reframe or create dialogue with more permanent exhibits in a museum? How do these ephemeral events create spaces for potentially new and changing publics to engage with museum objects and ethnographic work, as well as with histories of power, representation, continuities and discontinuities, and the movements of people and objects?

SPEAKERS
Jilda Andrews is an Indigenous cultural practitioner and museum anthropologist based in Canberra, Australia. Currently a Research Fellow with the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia, Jilda draws from her Yuwaalaraay heritage to investigate the connectedness of land, story and culture in museum collections. Jilda is interested in the dialogue between historical ethnography and contemporary cultural expression, and how these conversations can shine new light on contemporary museum work.

Aaron Glass is an Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center. His research focuses on First Nations visual art, material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North America, as well as the history of anthropology, museums, and ethnographic representation. Glass’s most recent book is Writing the Hamat’sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance (2021).

Jacqueline Hazen is a postdoctoral fellow at NMNH where she is mapping the museum's diverse collections from Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia. In addition to carrying out long-term fieldwork on Pohnpei and Guam for her PhD at New York University, she filmed, edited, and produced Island to Island, a short documentary made with practitioners of traditional Hawaiian chant living in New York City.

This seminar will be held virtually, will be recorded and be made available online.

Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology & Museums
Presented by the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology

Interventions:
Museums, Anthropology and their Publics

Thursday, October 7, 2021 -- 6 PM
RVSP: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_URDRb03iTt6tRBxuYodIfQ

Despite deep colonial legacies, museums can also be sites of interventions that illuminate obscured histories for expanded publics. Increasingly, diversely-positioned researchers in and outside museums are engaging collections and collaborating with source communities to create public-facing works, including film screenings at festivals, art installations, performances, temporary exhibits, and symposia presentations. Emerging through collaborative labor, these events create opportunities for diverse publics to convene. While not without their own risks, these interventions possess a range of dynamics: How do researchers and other creators from within and outside museums shape these works and the events where museum visitors and staff experience them? How are they organized to reframe or create dialogue with more permanent exhibits in a museum? How do these ephemeral events create spaces for potentially new and changing publics to engage with museum objects and ethnographic work, as well as with histories of power, representation, continuities and discontinuities, and the movements of people and objects?

SPEAKERS
Jilda Andrews is an Indigenous cultural practitioner and museum anthropologist based in Canberra, Australia. Currently a Research Fellow with the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia, Jilda draws from her Yuwaalaraay heritage to investigate the connectedness of land, story and culture in museum collections. Jilda is interested in the dialogue between historical ethnography and contemporary cultural expression, and how these conversations can shine new light on contemporary museum work.

Aaron Glass is an Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center. His research focuses on First Nations visual art, material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North America, as well as the history of anthropology, museums, and ethnographic representation. Glass’s most recent book is Writing the Hamat’sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance (2021).

Jacqueline Hazen is a postdoctoral fellow at NMNH where she is mapping the museum's diverse collections from Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia. In addition to carrying out long-term fieldwork on Pohnpei and Guam for her PhD at New York University, she filmed, edited, and produced Island to Island, a short documentary made with practitioners of traditional Hawaiian chant living in New York City.

This seminar will be held virtually, will be recorded and be made available online.

09/17/2021

Fellowships at the Smithsonian | Office of Fellowships

Wonderful opportunities to apply for graduate (10 week), predoctoral (12 month) & postdoctoral (1-2 years) fellowships to work with the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History & the wider Smithsonian

Applications are due 11.1.21

https://fellowships.si.edu

The Office of Fellowships has the central management and administrative responsibility for the Institution's programs of fellowships and research associate appointments. One of its primary objectives is the facilitation of the Smithsonian's scholarly interactions with students and scholars at univer...

09/09/2021

Mark your calendars for a new series of virtual events for SIMA -
Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology and Museums

What is the role and place of anthropology in museums in the 21st century? Thinking about these questions, alongside the legacies, ethical issues and potentials of museum collections, these seminars bring together scholars to have conversations around ideas animating research at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. This series builds upon the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology’s goal of putting theory and things together. Each seminar involves a conversation between two scholars and a NMNH postdoctoral fellow.

Interventions - Museums, Anthropology and their Publics
Thursday, October 7 -- 6 PM (US Eastern Time)
Jilda Andrews (Australian National University and National Museum of Australia), Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center), and Jacqueline Hazen (SI Postdoctoral Fellow, NMNH)

Remembering through Things, Encountering Objects and Kin in the Museum October 21 – Time TBA
Gaye Sculthorpe (British Museum), Jami Powell (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth) and Chris Urwin (Peter Buck Fellow, NMNH)

The State and the Museum: Representations and Refusals
Date and time TBA
Karl Johnstone (Haumi (NZ) LTD), Wayne Modest (National Museum of World Cultures, Wereldmuseum Rotterdam and the Research Center of Material Culture) and Sowparnika Balaswaminathan (Peter Buck Fellow, NMNH and Concordia University)

All seminars will be held virtually, will be recorded and be made available online. RSVP is TBA and
will be needed for each live event.

Mark your calendars for a new series of virtual events for SIMA -
Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology and Museums

What is the role and place of anthropology in museums in the 21st century? Thinking about these questions, alongside the legacies, ethical issues and potentials of museum collections, these seminars bring together scholars to have conversations around ideas animating research at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. This series builds upon the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology’s goal of putting theory and things together. Each seminar involves a conversation between two scholars and a NMNH postdoctoral fellow.

Interventions - Museums, Anthropology and their Publics
Thursday, October 7 -- 6 PM (US Eastern Time)
Jilda Andrews (Australian National University and National Museum of Australia), Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center), and Jacqueline Hazen (SI Postdoctoral Fellow, NMNH)

Remembering through Things, Encountering Objects and Kin in the Museum October 21 – Time TBA
Gaye Sculthorpe (British Museum), Jami Powell (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth) and Chris Urwin (Peter Buck Fellow, NMNH)

The State and the Museum: Representations and Refusals
Date and time TBA
Karl Johnstone (Haumi (NZ) LTD), Wayne Modest (National Museum of World Cultures, Wereldmuseum Rotterdam and the Research Center of Material Culture) and Sowparnika Balaswaminathan (Peter Buck Fellow, NMNH and Concordia University)

All seminars will be held virtually, will be recorded and be made available online. RSVP is TBA and
will be needed for each live event.

08/24/2021

Wonderful to have a virtual reunion with the 2019 cohort of SIMA students, interns, faculty fellows and visiting faculty to hear how people are navigating the pandemic, how they have developed their SIMA projects and to talk about how the pandemic has created challenges for working with collections and archives. The meeting also gave us time to talk about how the pandemic has given us all an opportunity to rethink what collaboration means, the affordances (and limits) of the digital and the ethics of research.

Huge thanks to all who were able to participate and to Matt Webb for the idea and coordinating the gathering.

Wonderful to have a virtual reunion with the 2019 cohort of SIMA students, interns, faculty fellows and visiting faculty to hear how people are navigating the pandemic, how they have developed their SIMA projects and to talk about how the pandemic has created challenges for working with collections and archives. The meeting also gave us time to talk about how the pandemic has given us all an opportunity to rethink what collaboration means, the affordances (and limits) of the digital and the ethics of research.

Huge thanks to all who were able to participate and to Matt Webb for the idea and coordinating the gathering.