New Perspectives (Asynchronous Session)
Rethinking Repatriation and Policy in Terms of Communication and Accessibility View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rebecca Bourgeois
Repatriation in Canada is highly situational, with little governmental oversight to monitor or regulate the process. This places the onus on Indigenous communities to advocate for returns, often without any material support beyond what they can provide themselves, including direction on where to start. The ongoing separation of these belongings from their communities continues to affect the health and identity of living peoples. Today, many Indigenous communities are engaged in efforts of resilience, which include the revival of ceremonies and traditional teachings. To do this important work, they need to be able to access their sacred and ceremonial belongings and reconnect them with their community. This paper discusses some of the barriers to repatriation in Canada and possible steps to improving communication between museums and Indigenous communities. It presents a pilot issue in a series of booklets aimed at providing publicly accessible, reader-friendly resources for Indigenous communities. The purpose of this first booklet is to provide background information on the acts and policies that could be encountered during their repatriation journey, and to point to ways forward where policies do not yet exist. This example is discussed in the context of repatriation and within a larger conversation around accessibility and community-institutional partnerships.
What is Heritage Diplomacy? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tuuli Lahdesmaki
During the past years, policymakers, cultural managers, and scholars have become increasingly interested in the instrumental value of cultural heritage sites and museums, identifying them as spaces for cooperation and underlining their potential for diplomacy. Recently, scholars have explored the linkages between cultural heritage, museums, and diplomacy with various emphases and conceptualizations. In this paper, we examine the conceptualization of heritage diplomacy in scholarship and the notions of cultural heritage and approaches to power included in it. Our critical close reading of 57 sampled scholarly publications reveals how the concept of heritage diplomacy is ambiguous. Its meanings vary from heritage-related actions in states’ international relations and foreign policy to providing contact zones at heritage sites and museums for facilitating intercultural dialogue within and between diverse communities. In scholarship, heritage diplomacy is commonly approached from a conservationist point of view, emphasizing the preservation of tangible cultural heritage through knowledge exchange, material aid, and funding. Besides international organizations and states, the concept is extended to include people-to-people diplomatic relationships that scholars, however, rarely scrutinize. Our study underlines that cultural heritage and power relations are entangled in the conceptualizations and explorations of heritage diplomacy. A critical approach to this entanglement encourages us to rethink cultural heritage sites and museums through a transnational perspective that highlights the historical connectivity and mobility of people, objects, and ideas, as well as the uses of power included in narratives dealing with such connectivity.
Featured Defining Environments of Art Museums: Enhancing Cultural Learning in a Museum View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jungwon Lee
Teaching art history to art major students is essential to enhance their understanding of old masterpieces and artifacts. The class itself, including lecturing and explaining pictures on slides, however, cannot provide enough inspirations to students in terms of applying what they learned from class to their actual art practice. Providing students with opportunities to make interactions with artifacts is necessary to facilitate their creative and critical thinking process. Not only contemporary museums are the key to experience various cultures from all around the world, but they also allow students to have interactive experience beyond the class. Museums serve the public in a wide variety of ways, as exhibition places for art and artifacts and, at the same time, as venues for social and educational events. Nevertheless, as Eisner and Dobbs have noted, many museums are culturally rich and pedagogically poor, as evidenced by the tendency of most visitors to reject the docent tour, refuse the audio-guide, and leave the catalogue unread at museums. Because most museum visitors choose to be on their own, the role of the physical environment, which reflects democratic education in museums, is important in helping visitors create meaningful experiences. The purpose of this study is to examine how art major students experience contemporary art through museum spaces.The study considers factors which positively or negatively affect the appreciation of arts and experiences through artworks.
Developing and Beta Testing a Digital Records System and Logistical Task Stream for The Fashion Archive Using Retail Management Inventory Strategies and E-commerce Product Categorization View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Kearney, Morgan Igou, Madeleine Leidner
Multiple methods and processes of object documentation have been used since the establishment of the historic and contemporary dress collection in the 1930s, known since 2018 as The Fashion Archive. This produced a collection of unorganized, undocumented, and inaccessible objects. Advances in technology have provided unique opportunities to rethink, redesign, and reemploy the ways in which previously time-consuming tasks within the process of accessioning an object into a museum collection are performed. Resulting data can be much more easily and accurately accessed, imported, and exported into a variety of systems. This paper describes the process of utilizing technology to digitize records in The Fashion Archive, developing and beta testing the efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility of an online database for the documentation of objects. For this study, 276 objects located in 56 boxes, housed in two sections of the high-density storage unit, were photographed. Physical documents were scanned, reviewed, and edited using the terminology and classification systems of ICOM. All the associated data for each object was entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and links were created to connect the external documents and object photographs housed in the cloud. The main outcome of this project is clean and verifiable data ready to be migrated to a web-based collections management database. The digitization of all documentation associated with each of the objects in the collection should be a high priority for not only the safekeeping of records but to make them easily accessible for both internal and external users.
Woeful Inadequacy: The Incomplete Recommendations of the 2016 Truth and Reconciliation for Museums in Canada
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Liz Feld
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a report with ninety-four Calls to Action that address the crimes committed against Indigenous populations. With museums being historically complicit in violent collecting practices and ongoing misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in Canada, discussions around decolonization and reconciliation feel premature. The current TRC Calls to Action do not hold museums accountable for participation in colonial practices and or detail demonstrable actions to engage in genuine reconciliation. The first step is creating a database to provide public access to Indigenous artifacts with the goal of repatriating Indigenous sacred objects and human remains.
