[csaa-forum] Australian Museum Seminar, in association with CCR: Richard Sandell, 28 April

[Reena Dobson]

Apologies for cross-postings

 

        

 

 

Countering Prejudice: Activism and Agency in the Museum

 

The Centre for Cultural Research (UWS) and the Australian Museum present
a seminar by Dr Richard Sandell, University of Leicester

 

When?   Monday 28th April, 3-5pm

Where? Australian Museum Theatrette, 6 College Street (please enter via
William Street)

 

 

Abstract

Research in recent years has highlighted the constitutive or generative
capacities of museums - their potential to shape, rather than simply
reflect, social relations and realities. Museum displays, and the
representations of difference embodied within them, have social effects
and consequences. Very often these effects have been understood in
broadly negative terms. Museums have been identified as agencies which
both shape and reinforce dominant (oppressive, discriminatory)
understandings of difference by excluding and marginalising or by
constructing representations that are reductive, essentialising and
often stereotypical. By casting racial, gender, physical and other
'variations' as inferior or deviant, museums have privileged ways of
seeing that have made prejudiced understandings of difference both more
perceptible and permissible (Sandell 2007). In recent years, however,
there has been growing interest amongst both practitioners and
researchers in the social agency and responsibility of museums and, more
particularly, in their potential to frame (and reframe) the
conversations which society has about difference. A growing number of
museums have developed exhibitions, displays and other programmes which
attempt to open up possibilities for mutual respect and understanding
between different social groups; which seek to counter prejudice and
which frame the ways in which visitors participate in public (often
morally charged) debates. Despite this trend, relatively little is known
about the social effects and consequences of these socially purposeful
interpretive interventions. How do visitors respond to the exhibitions
and other projects they encounter? How, if at all, do these encounters
unsettle or reconfigure existing perceptions? To

what extent might these interventions shape broader social debates. This
seminar presentation draws on recent research to consider these and
related questions.

 

About Dr Sandell

Dr Richard Sandell is Head of the Department of Museum Studies at the
University of Leicester. Richard's research interests focus on the
social role and agency of museums and, in particular, their potential to
engage audiences in debates around contemporary social issues. He is the
author of Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference (2007),
editor of Museums, Society, Inequality (2002) and co-editor (with Robert
R. Janes) of Museum Management and Marketing (2007). He is currently a
Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National
University pursuing his research project, Museums and Human Rights.
Richard is a Partner Investigator on the CCR-led Australian Research
Council Linkage grant Hot Science Global Citizens: the agency of the
museum sector in climate change interventions.

 

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