Community Collections (Asynchronous - Online Only)
George III The Mind Behind the Myth: Community Collections and Interpretations on Mental Health View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jatinder Kailey
2020 marks the 200th death anniversary of George III. He is popularly known as the mad King and spent much of his later life recuperating at Kew Palace. Historic Royal Palaces will be marking the anniversary through a special exhibition, George III: The Mind Behind The Myth, which will focus on the monarch’s achievements as well as his mental health journey. The exhibition will feature objects and artworks from the Royal Collection as well as a display which invites Londoners to share their personal objects that symbolise their own mental health journey. The exhibition has also provided a forum for discussion of contemporary views on mental health. Historic Royal Palaces has partnered with local community groups to interpret a selection of the items on display, reflecting on how what we know about George's ill health speaks to men's lived experiences in twenty-first century London. Today, mental health is still something of a taboo subject. King George III ended his life in seclusion, but attitudes are changing. This paper focuses on how heritage spaces can provide opportunity to open up conversations and change conceptions of what counts.
Emergent Archives and Crowdsourced Narratives: Two Development Stories From the Queensland State Library View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Seth Ellis
This paper suggests and connects two ideas: First, that digitising collection objects creates new objects in the form of the digital records, which can then form the basis of emerging archives in patterns of public use and interaction. These emerging archives then become a powerful vector for community participation and decentralised authorship of historical and cultural narratives. As such, they deserve to be collected, archived, and made public themselves, which may require new archival strategies. Second, I suggest that digitising non-material objects such as audio-visual materials allows us to examine new ways of describing and cataloguing historical material, by using narrative as metadata. This use of narrative description as part of the essential cataloguing of objects is also of use in organising and understanding community contributions to catalogues and descriptions. Narrative metadata is one of the particular affordances of digitised archives and collections, and can be used not only to strengthen community engagement, but to generate new, archivable historical material in the form of public narrative contributions. The confluence of these two ideas is apparent in collections like that of the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, which houses community object-archives in the form of home movies, photos, and other materials collected from or donated by the public. I consider these ideas through two recent projects at the State Library: the Corley Explorer, and my own work as 2019 Mittelheuser scholar-in-residence, exploring sound as historical material.
Monuments and Public Spaces: Digital Contrapposto and Figural Politics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Young Tack Oh
The research investigates the relationship between monuments and public spaces, to encourage increased representation, and to rethink the way we honor or commemorate our heroes. A survey of monuments in Detroit, a majority black city, revealed that most were dedicated to historic white European figures. Urban experience is conditioned by image and such statues or monuments project complex and contradictory meanings that precede the history of the city itself. These “moral figures” also territorialize public spaces to which they don’t historically or culturally belong. When the body is an agent in the production of urban history, culture, and policy those few statues dedicated to people of color were partial bodily representations that lacked the same physical realism and weren’t interpreted under the same criteria. Consequently, current works are not reflective of the local community that once thrived on these lands and neighborhoods. No matter when such monuments were made, the public outgrows their accepted meanings. Their very permanence makes it vulnerable to erasure- it can only be either rejected or accepted. It begs monuments to retain more mutability or ephemerality and allow opportunities to evolve and change. Digitizing monuments can preserve narratives and oral histories of communities. Using a simplified system of photogrammetry, digital monuments are generated as sites of protest that shift the curatorial power of space-making and spatial stewardship from authorities to the people- modern subjectivities can be overlaid at will.
France and the Restitution of African Cultural Property: A Critical Race Theory View View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Antonio C. Cuyler, Khamal Patterson
In 2020, French senators unanimously voted to return 27 objects held in the country’s museums to Benin and Senegal. When speaking to the French Press, Roselyne Bachelot, the French Minister of Culture, said, “the bill is not an act of repentance, but an act of friendship and trust (Selvin, 2020).” Without repentance, how can France hope to build friendship and trust with its former African colonies? Although extant literature (Curtis, 2007; DeBlock, 2019; Hicks, 2020; Maaba, 2009; Maples, 2020 Munjeri, 2009; Nevadomsky, 2018; Paquette, 2020; Roberts, 2019; Savoy, 2021; Shyllon, 2014; Shyllon, 2015; and Thompson, 2020) provides insight into how France could restitute African cultural property, this literature has not explicitly considered the role that anti-Black racism plays in France’s resistance to the repatriation and restitution of African cultural property. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the research question: in what ways might Critical Race Theory (CRT) inform policies and practices on the restitution of African cultural property from France back to African nations?
