CfP: The Socially Purposeful Museum

Museum 2012: The Socially Purposeful Museum
National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan
20-22 November 2012

An international conference organised by the National Taipei University of Education, the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, National Museums Liverpool and the National Museum of History,
Taipei.

Building on the success of the Museum 2010 and Museum 2011 events, this conference explores the notion of the socially purposeful museum – a dynamic, vital institution that has rich relationships with diverse audiences; that nurtures participatory and co-creative practice and is part of people’s everyday lives; that seeks to foster progressive social values and, at the same time, is widely recognised as a site for dialogue and debate; that works collaboratively with a range of institutions within and beyond the cultural sector to engender vibrant, inclusive and more just societies .

“Museum 2012″ will be a forum for museum practitioners, leaders and policy makers, researchers, academics and students to share ideas and discuss strategies around three interlinked themes;

Growing audiences: How can museums strengthen relationships with existing audiences and, at the same time, open up to new audiences that have traditionally been under-represented in most institutions’ visitor profiles? What roles are marketing and public relations playing in embedding museums in community, social and political life? What strategies support museums in becoming more highly valued by diverse stakeholders, more visible and talked about?

Partnerships and participatory practice: How are partnerships with agencies beyond the cultural sector transforming the practices, roles and impacts of museums? What opportunities and challenges are presented by initiatives that enable communities to actively shape the future direction of museums?

Contemporary issues and difficult histories: How are museums, galleries and heritage sites engaging audiences in debates surrounding difficult histories and contemporary social issues? How are museums responding to (and seeking to impact) global and local concerns from environmental degradation and health inequalities to human rights and censorship? What strategies are museums deploying to address controversial, contested and challenging social and political issues?

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

David Fleming, Director, National Museums Liverpool
Catharine Braithwaite, media relations and strategic marketing specialist and Associate Lecturer, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
Lisa Lee, Director, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, Chicago
Andrew McIntyre, Principal Consultant and co-founder of Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
Jocelyn Dodd, Director, Research Centre for Museums and Galleries
Richard Sandell, Head of Museum Studies, University of Leicester

Call for proposals

“Museum 2012″ will feature different kinds of format for sharing ideas and engaging delegates. Alongside keynote presentations and conference papers from leaders in the field will be panel discussions that bring together people from different professional backgrounds, countries and viewpoints; discussions between representatives from communities/ partner bodies outside the culture sector and museum professionals with whom they have collaborated; and inspiring visits to museums. We welcome proposals for presentations and other kinds of session that address the conference themes.

Call for proposals Document
Conference Proposal Form
Please complete a conference proposal form and submit to Dr. Yung-Neng Lin museum2012@gmail.com by 10 May 2012.

Enquiries and requests for Proposal Forms may be sent to: Dr Yung-Neng Lin, National Taipei University of Education (museum2012@gmail.com) or Jocelyn Dodd, Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (jad25@le.ac.uk)

We will notify you of the outcome of your proposal by the end of May 2012.

We anticipate that selected papers will be published to accompany Museum 2012 and authors will be asked to submit papers of between 2000 and 5000 words by 30 September 2012 by email to Dr. Yung-Neng Lin.

CfP: City Museums: Collisions | Connections

City Museums:  Collisions | Connections
CAMOC / Museum of Vancouver, Vancouver, Canada

October 24-26, 2012

 

Deadline – April 15, 2012

CAMOC, the International Committee for the Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), in collaboration with the Museum of Vancouver, invites papers for “City Museums:  Collisions | Connections”, a conference on city museums and their engagement in city life to be held at the Museum of Vancouver, October 24-26, 2012. We are soliciting panels, presentations (15 minutes in length), virtual exhibitions/apps, films, and other presentations about city museums.

The conference will bring people together to talk about how city museums are reconsidering their role in civic life due to the enormous pressure cities face in terms of aging infrastructure, the need for urban regeneration, economic and environmental crises, and social issues such demographic shifts, global diasporas, increasing immigrant and urban Aboriginal populations. The conference will look at city museums under development, urban/suburban city museums, and city museums in large and small cities.

For further information, or to submit a proposal (300-500 words accompanied by a 200-word biography by April 15, 2012), contact CatherineC.Cole@telus.net

 

CfP: ‚Placing’ Europe in the Museum: people(s), places, identities

International Conference – as part of the European Museums in an Age of Migrations (MeLA) European Commission FP7-funded project

Organised by the International Centre for Cultural & Heritage Studies, Newcastle University
3-4 September 2012

The imperatives surrounding the museum representation of place have shifted from the late eighteenth century to today. This is in part because the political significance of place itself has changed and continues to change at all scales, from local, civic, regional to national and supranational. At the same time, recognition of changes in population flows, migration patterns and demographic movement  now underscore both cultural and political practice, be it in the accommodation of ‘diversity’ in cultural and social policy, scholarly explorations of hybridity or in state immigration controls. These issues, taken historically, have particular significance for contemporary understandings of the role of place in individual, collective and state notions of society in the EU, in member states and in other European countries. How do European museums present societies as bound to, or enabled by, place and places? Or as having roots in places and/or taking routes from, to and through places? What cartographical groupings, borders, knowledges (e.g. archaeological, ethnographic etc.) and traversals order and organise populations into societies in the museum? What is the metaphorical ‘place’ of place in European museums now, what does this say about identities?

To invert these questions, we might ask what happens or what can happen, when the ‘peoples’ and ‘places’ implicated in, and at least to some extent constructed in, museum representation shift, change, multiply, fragment and/or move? What happens when the museum desire for fixity is disrupted by new sensibilities towards population flows, multiple heritages and the shifting territories of geopolitical places? Should museums’ representational practices change? If so how? What are the new dimensions of identity construction and production in museums whose physical place is fixed, but whose audiences, with their changing heritages and cultures, are not?

Confirmed keynote speakers include:
Peter Aronsson, Professor, Uses of the Past and Cultural Heritage, Tema Q, Culture Studies,  Linköpings University, Sweden;
Ullrich Kockel, Professor of Ethnology and Folk Life, University of Ulster;
Annemarie de Wildt, Curator, Amsterdam Museum.

Submissions are invited in the following areas:
*  Theoretical approaches to the study of museums and place
*  Representation of migration and mobility in European Museums
*  European and EU political contexts for place-people-culture relations
*  Place identities in museums: European, national, local and hybridised
*  Relationships between place and ethnicity in European museum representations
*  Visitor experiences of place representations in European museums
*  Belonging and alienation in European museums

Submissions are invited for individual papers and for thematic sessions comprising 3-4 papers.

Instructions for submission
Abstracts of maximum 300 words for individual papers should be submitted to Victoria Patton (victoria.patton@ncl.ac.uk) by 30th March 2012.

Session proposals should include abstracts for all papers plus a 300-word introductory text, to be submitted to Victoria Patton
(victoria.patton@ncl.ac.uk) by 30th March 2012.

The abstracts should include the following information:
*  Title of paper
*  Author name(s)
*  Affiliation and position
*  Email address
*  Abstract
*  Keywords (maximum 5)

Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their proposals in early May.
Accepted speakers will be required to submit a 2000-5000-word full paper in advance of the conference (to Victoria Patton by 2nd July 2012). These full papers will be included on a CD in the delegate packs provided during the conference.  Paper presentations at the conference will be limited to 20 minutes in duration and should therefore summarise the key arguments and findings of the full paper.

There is no registration fee for the conference and lunch is included on both days.

MeLA Work Package 1 Conference organising committee International Centre for Cultural & Heritage Studies, Newcastle University:
Dr Chris Whitehead (WP1 leader)
Dr Rhiannon Mason (Co-investigator)
Dr Susannah Eckersley (research associate) Dr Victoria Patton (research secretary) http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/icchs/mission/