Collaboration, Conversation and Reconciliation
CEREV and les études supérieures en muséologie à l’Université du Québec à Montréal are proud to co-present
Collaboration, Conversation and Reconciliation:
Learning how to address the uneasy conversation between indigenous Australians and settler society
A presentation by
Dr. Andrea Witcomb
(Deakin University)
September 24, 2014
3 – 4:30 PM
Room M-9550
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM)
1001 Boulevard de Maisonneuve E.
Montréal, QC
map
This paper will take a number of case studies from a large research project funded by the Australian Research Council on the Australian collecting sector and its engagement with cultural diversity to argue that Australian museums, from across the sector, have developed a strong curatorial practice in which Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander people are no longer represented as a precursor to Australian history but as integral to the way in which we understand ourselves as a post-settler society.
Dr. Witcomb will use a number of examples from across the museum sector to explain how this has been achieved through a curatorial practice that increasingly encourages collaboration and conversations across cultural differences in ways that foster a recognition that we all value our relationship to place and to each other. She will focus on exhibitions in which Indigenous Australians are included within mainstream exhibitions – as well as exhibitions which start from an Indigenous point of view but which seek to have a conversation with all Australians.
This presentation will be made in English.
Dr. Andrea Witcomb is Associate Professor in cultural heritage at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia). She is the Director of the Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific and Deputy Director of the Alfred Deakin Research Institute. Her research interests range across the museum and heritage fields and are informed by theoretical, historical and professional practice concerns. She brings an interdisciplinary approach to her research, locating her work at the intersection of history, museology and cultural studies. Her work is driven by a desire to understand the ways in which a range of heritage practices, including memorialisation, can be used to foster cross-cultural understandings and dialogue.
