DISCUSSION | with Critical Museum Studies Working Group

Center for Experimental Ethnography

A Discussion on "What Should the 21st Century Museum Be?" moderated by the Critical Museum Studies Graduate Students

Penn Museum

<p>The Critical Museums Studies Group will present their current efforts to rethink and de-stabilize the Penn Museum, including a mapping project that re-peoples the museum, a website with archival and historical context of the Museum's role in violent collection, and a pilot Anti-Colonial tour project that pays attention to the language, labor, and people behind and among the exhibits.</p><p>This discussion will be livestreamed, as well as a  live event with in-person attendance at the Harrison Auditorium at the Penn Museum.  It will be led by members of the CEE Critical Museums Working Group.</p><p></p><p><em>*Pursuant to University COVID-19 guidelines, all in-person participants will need to attest to being vaccinated or present a vaccination card upon check-in at the Penn Museum Main Entrance.*</em></p>

<h2>Critical Museums Working Group</h2><p>The Critical Museums Studies Group is a group of graduate students with the Center for Experimental Ethnography. For the past several months, the group has been working on critically re-imagining the Penn Museum and its operation within perpetuating harmful, colonialist, and racist modes of operation, ordering, and othering. They have focused on three major themes of “Ethics and human remains collections“, “Mapping, Visualizing, and Humanizing”, and an “Anti-colonial Tour”.</p><p>Members include Hakimah-Abdul Fattah (Anthropology), Chelsea Cohen (Anthropology), Francisco Diaz (Anthropology), Christopher Green (Anthropology), VanJessica Gladney (Anthropology), Katleho Kano Shoro (Anthropology), Chrislyn Laurore (Africana Studies &amp; Anthropology), Stephanie Mach (Anthropology), Breanna Moore (History), Charlotte Williams (Anthropology), and Paul Wolff Mitchell (Anthropology). </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><h2></h2>

<h2>Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Problem of Decolonizing Museums</h2>

<p>Our website, <a href="https://decolonizingmuseums.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://decolonizingmuseums.com/,</a> includes detailed information, resources, biographies, panelist videos, and the conference schedule.</p>

<h3>A virtual international conference organized by the Center for Experimental Ethnography and hosted by the Penn Museum, 20-23 October 2021</h3>

<p>Over the past several decades scholars and practitioners have critically reconsidered the role of ethnographic museums in the development and representation of knowledge about people and processes throughout the world. Persistent questions have emerged again and again: What are the relationships between colonialism and collection? What issues of accountability surround contemporary knowledge production and representation? How do we think through the challenges of repatriation? And what might repair look like? These are not new questions, and they have been asked not only within museum settings, but also across the discipline of anthropology as a whole for the past thirty years. Yet as museums attempt to reevaluate their practices of collecting, exhibiting, and repatriating, we must still confront – and determine a new relationship to – the legacies of Enlightenment-based scientific humanism and its imperial underpinnings.</p><p>This conference builds on some of the issues being raised within European and South African contexts, while also thinking through the particularities of the view from the United States. Drawing from the insights and experiences of scholars, museum practitioners, and educators, we seek to join the conversations related to settler colonialism to those related to slavery and imperialism. We also seek to chart a terrain that emphasizes multi-vocality and multi-modality, and that imagines the kinds of collaboration that might be possible between European, North American, South African, and other stakeholders. Finally, we want to elaborate new forms of relationship museums might have to their audiences.</p>

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DISCUSSION | with Critical Museum Studies Working Group

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DISCUSSION | with Critical Museum Studies Working Group

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