Critical Approaches to Museums & Heritage

Here is the full list of seminars in this semester, the last date is Thursday 11th May 2017 and the seminar topic covers human rights in Mexico-US border museums.

Reminder - our final talk for this semester:

Lachlan Dudley, "Empathy and Museum Visitors (dis)engagement with Mental Illness

4pm - 5.30 pm, followed by drinks at the Pizza Cafe

Anthropology Museum, ground floor, Michie Building, UQ, St Lucia

ALL WELCOME

Check out the beautiful Solomon Islands exhibition at the same time, well worth the trip out to St Lucia if you are not based on campus

Many thanks to Stephen Nichols for his engaging presentation about public archaeology practice and mass media.
We found his exploration of the communication of archaeological research through our everyday mass media: press, tv and film: to be very thought provoking.
His foregrounded notion, as introduced, of a rapidly expanding user base for an 'online' digital archive and the growing facilitation of access to this worldwide depository, is quite breathtaking to comprehend.
It was useful for us all to explore the public's very real perception of what other, perhaps more rational thinkers, might consider to be very bizarre contemporary 'beliefs' such as the Gympie Pyramid and the Stradbroke Island Galleon: which can only reasonably be explained via a sort of imagined history or myth creation.
His message about public archaeology practice for archaeologists was, more generally, about de-colonising the angle of delivery in public archaeology and about entering into a genuine dialogue with community interests in developing that approach and allowing that to inform our understanding.
It's rewarding to observe that inclusion, involvement and embodiment were all key factors in the success of the Mill Point Archaeological Project, a signal achievement for UQ.

Reminder - tomorrow at 4pm, our next talk, presented by Stephen Nichols: "Let them eat static" at the Anthropology Museum at UQ. Please spread the word.

Announcing the talks for second semester:

Thursday 4 August: Shawn Rowlands, Bard Graduate Center/AMNH Postdoctoral Fellow in Museum Anthropology
Glass Frontiers: Curating Culture Contact in Oceania of the Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries

Thursday 8 September: Stephen Nichols, Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, Queensland Government
Let Them Eat Static: Public Archaeology and Mass Media in the Twenty-first Century

Thursday 22 September: Lachlan Dudley, Australian National University
Empathy and Museum Visitor (Dis)engagement with Mental Illness

Thursday 6 October: Tracy Cooper-Lavery, Gold Coast City Art Gallery Director
Welcome to the New Age: Visual arts, the Gold Coast and a New Gallery

The venue is the Anthropology Museum at UQ St Lucia - ground floor, Michie Building

All welcome and please spread the word!

Don't forget Brian Fagan's talk tomorrow at 4pm, Room 262 Steele Building UQ - spread the word

Next week on Friday Brian Fagan is giving the UQ School of Social Science annual Hall Lecture, "Droughts & Attacking Oceans - an archaeologist looks at climate change", his lecture will be looking at how past societies have responded and adapted to drought, flood and extreme weather events. If you are interested, the event is on at 4.30-6.00pm, lecture theatre 101 in the Abel Smith Building, UQ St Lucia campus.
The School would like people to RSVP cob tomorrow, so if you want to come along, please follow this link: https://social-science.uq.edu.au/hall-annual-lecture

Reparative Aesthetics

Panel Discussion: Ambivalence and The Archival Turn
2pm Saturday 7 May 2016

Griffith University Art Gallery (Southbank)

Join exhibiting artist Fiona Pardington, photographer, anthropologist and curator Michael Aird and artist Vernon Ah Kee, chaired by exhibition curator Professor Sue Best, as they explore the use of historical archives as sources in contemporary art that can highlight oppressive or unjust historical events, and consider how ambivalence overcomes the need to privilege aesthetics over politics or politics over aesthetics.