Director’s Greeting: Welcome back & looking forward!
Welcome back, CEREV friends! I had a wonderful sabbatical, full of the always surprising and thought provoking challenges of public scholarship and curating difficult knowledge.
My June 2013 exhibit Souvenir, Talisman Toy in the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, Poland was a fascinating experience. Part of this was navigating the institutional politics of bringing “critical museology” to an historic, East European national museum, contributing to their growing pains (and experiencing some of my own) as they “Europeanize” and “globalize.” And part of it was the success of the exhibit itself. This, along with its short run (less than 3 weeks), pushed me to spend much of the year creating a bilingual catalog based on the exhibit, as well as a website, so that the materials could have an ongoing life and be used for pedagogical purposes in Poland and abroad.
We have an exciting year ahead at CEREV, including projects by students and visiting scholars, including:
- – A presentation by Dr. Andrea Witcomb (Deakin University), on her research project on the Australian collecting sector, its engagement with cultural diversity, curatorial practice and representations of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander peoples in museums on September 24 (co-sponsored with les études supérieures en muséologie à l’Université du Québec à Montréal)
- – A set of two workshops in November, co-hosted with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, in which participants will learn the basics of using these cameras for the production of oral history interviews
- – Multimedia training for Dr. Tracy Zhang and her Simone de Beauvoir Institute course WSDB498I: Anti-Racist Feminist Media
- – Hosting visiting anthropologists Gaelyn and Gustavo Aguilar from University of Maine at Farmington (TUG collective) and their project Who Eats at Taco Bell?, which grew out of the wonderful exhibition-research-collaboration workshop that CEREV’s Banting postdoctoral fellow Monica Patterson ran at the Encuentro this past June
We’re also proud that Monica has just started as an tenure-track assistant professor at Carleton University.
We welcome new SSHRC postdoctoral fellow Nadine Blumer, who is transitioning from a dissertation on memorializing the Roma Holocaust, to a new project looking at the new Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR).
We are looking forward to a fruitful new partnership between CEREV and the Cultural Studies Research Group at the University of Winnipeg, led by Chancellor’s Research Chair Angela Failler, kicking off with seven CEREV faculty and student affiliates attending our co-sponsored “Museum Openings” workshop at UW on the September opening weekend of the CMHR, including a tour of the new museum.
And while I’m taking the reins back over from our interim Acting Director Shelley Butler, she will continue to be involved in developing CEREV’s programming, structure and mandate. Our indispensable staff members Mary Caple and Lex Milton continue to work behind the scenes (and sometimes out front!) developing our projects, doing outreach, and supporting our operations. We hope to hear from you all, and that you’ll drop by for a visit, and pass along the word about the fabulous resources at CEREV for the expanding domain of research-creation.
