Collecting the West

Introducting …. Dr Rachel Horncastle @drrachel4cottesloe who is already knocking it put of the park. So inspirational to hear from Dr Rachel at this afternoon’s campaign launch in front of a big crowd of supporters and volunteers. Another win for the community independent movement. Dr Rachel thew down the gauntlet and challenged other state candidates to disclose their donors IN REAL TIME! Check out the “Supporter Wall” on Dr Rachel’s website, which is already displaying donation details. #AhealthychangeforCottesloe #Adoseofintegrityinpolitics #independents #community #northfreo #peppermintgrove #mosmanpark #mtclaremont #citybeachsouth #swanbourne #claremont #cottesloe #wapolitics #transparency #integrity

And fittingly for the week of International Day for Women's Rights - the topic of tomorrow's Archaeology Seminar is on the Matildas of Pacific Archaeology (check what the Matilda Effect is: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unheralded-women-scientists-finally-getting-their-due-180973082/)

This may be of interest....and fully on line!

CfP: Imperial Lives Conference

by Carl Deussen
Date: 30.-31.3.2023
Place: Online/Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne (RJM).
For reasons of greater accessibility and sustainability, the conference will be held completely online.

After years of struggle, deflection, and hesitation, ethnographic museums are increasingly accepting the need for decolonization. Often, this is framed in terms of diversity and empowerment and with a special focus on creator communities and their diaspora. We agree: the victims of imperial violence and their descendants need to be at the centre of any fruitful decolonization process.
However, this leaves a momentous gap: what about the creators of the museum, the collectors who often violently amassed the collections, as well as those who are implicated in their legacy today? Whose acts of perpetration, violence, transgression, betrayal, superiority, exploitation, and misunderstanding lie at the foundation of the museum? When it comes to the actors in question and their agency, what prevails is often absence or a retreat into abstraction, both in academia and the museum.
The “Imperial Lives” conference wants to widen this perspective and offer a complementary approach: it aims at exploring ways of overcoming this colonial aphasia by focussing on the concrete, often messy biographies behind the institution “ethnographic museum”. We propose that the encounter with the personified past of empire – the biographies of imperial collectors – creates a space of unsettlement in which the personal implication of all members of a post-imperial democratic society can be explored and collective memory transformed.
Ethnographic museums, as one of the most visible sites of imperial continuity, offer an exemplary field for the exploration of imperial perpetration and implication that goes beyond the bounds of anthropology – especially when it comes to the interaction with broader audiences. This is why the conference will focus on both research and narration, inviting transdisciplinary perspectives from history, cultural, and literary studies as well as artistic, journalistic and activist practices.
We call for contributions addressing issues of biographic knowledge generation and representation, including questions such as:
· How can biographic approaches to the legacy of empire contribute to the decolonisation of ethnographic museums?
· What may be the archival foundation for biographic approaches to the imperial past? How can imperial personas be portrayed if the only archival material available was produced by themselves? What is the role of ethnographic collections as archives?
· What kind of biographies are suited for such decolonial biographic research?
· Who should be doing this research? How does the personal situatedness of the researcher affect the outcome?
· What forms of representation, what narrative strategies should be used to depict imperial biographies?
· With museums as the sites of a society’s collective memory: Which narrative approaches are fruitful contributions to the “work of remembrance”?
· What is the relationship between historical factuality and biographic fiction, especially concerning the archival inequalities of empire?
· In how far can artistic research and practice enrich modes of biographic display?

Conference language: English
There will be a recording of all papers, keynotes, and panels.

We are inviting scholars from the fields of:
ethnography, anthropology, literary studies, historical science, cultural studies, museology, art history, arts (e.g. fine arts, film, literature etc.), provenance research, journalism.

CfP:
Please hand in your abstract of max. 500 words (in English, + short bio) until 2023/01/30 via:
https://tinyurl.com/abstract-imperiallives2023

For any questions, feel free to get in touch via [email protected]

Google Forms: Sign-in Access Google Forms with a personal Google account or Google Workspace account (for business use).

Really excited to be supported to run this workshop!

Collecting at the Crossroads: Comparing the History of Encounter Studies in the Australian and American “Wests” | Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University We propose to explore the ways museum collections have shaped perceptions of settler-colonialism and Indigenous peoples through a comparison of two “Wests”: western North America and western Australia. We will bring together scholars working with the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at The Universi...

Why Western Australia’s coast rivals the Bermuda Triangle At least 1,600 shipwrecks—and countless tales of pirates and plunder—lie offshore, under Indian Ocean waters. Now maritime explorers are diving down to reveal their secrets.

Three exciting PhD opportunities as part of the ARC Linkage Project 'Mobilising Dutch East India Company Collections for New Global Stories'. Applications close on 31 October: https://www.scholarships.uwa.edu.au/search?sc_view=1&id=12267

Collected coins to return to WAM

Centuries old shipwreck coins to be returned to Western Australia Stolen artefacts from the infamous Batavia shipwreck will be returned to the Western Australian Museum, 30 ...

Really thrilled to get funded for our ARC LP: 'Mobilising Dutch East India Company collections for new global stories'. Project starts 2023. Call for researchers and PhD students soon.

https://hrc.cass.anu.edu.au/news/nma-anu-summer-scholars-program-2023?fbclid=IwAR2QpNBNX8ARoXF1WVpNv4FhsjARjKBWedH5hPvvnnvzv3PWUD1B0F9P-Jg

NMA ANU Summer Scholars Program 2023 The National Museum of Australia in partnership with the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University is delighted to offer a Summer Scholars program for 2023.

The print version of this great paper now available!

Foundational photographs: Photograph collecting in Western Australia’s early Museum and Art Gallery Abstract. Overlooked among the collections of the Western Australian Museum and Art Gallery, opened in Perth in 1895, is a large cross-disciplinary photograph c

Wonderful story on ABC radio featuring CTW CI Jane Lydon and PI Kate Gregory: 'The State Library of Western Australia's collection holds a handful of daguerreotypes -- the earliest form of photography -- and a research project, Collecting the West, is unearthing more information about those early images.'

Historic 'mirrors with a memory' reveal their stories in library research project Monochrome portraits of unsmiling people might seem dull at first glance, but a re-examination of some of the oldest photographs in WA's state collection is turning up surprising stories.

Great story of Gaye's research

How one of Australia's earliest surviving Aboriginal artefacts ended up lost in Paris A water container made from bull kelp was collected by French expeditioners in the 1700s, but the incredibly rare artefact became mislabelled and lost in various museums for more than 100 years.