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: Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry

Cultural mapping, which spans many academic disciplines and methodologies, is informed by the observation that cultural phenomena are distributed spatially and that people experience the symbolic resources of their communities in spatial terms. While cultural mapping is firmly grounded in the world of academic disciplines and inquiry, it has a pragmatic dimension as well. In the Creative City Network of Canada’s Cultural Mapping Toolkit, for example, Cultural Mapping is defined pragmatically as a process of collecting, recording, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to describe the cultural resources, networks, links and patterns of usage of a given community or group. Cultural mapping is generally regarded as a systematic tool to identify and record local cultural assetsand these assets are thought of as tangible or quantitative (physical spaces, cultural organizations, public forms of promotion and self-representation, programs, cultural industries, natural heritage, cultural heritage, people, and resources) and intangible or qualitative (community narratives, values, relationships, rituals, traditions, history, shared sense of place). Together these assets help define communities in terms of cultural identity, vitality, sense of place, and quality of life.

Cultural mapping, then, is a theoretically informed research practice and a highly pragmatic planning and development tool.  But cultural mapping can also be viewed as a form of cultural production and expression. Mapping can itself be culturalthat is, animated by artists and artistic approaches to mapping collective and competing senses of place, space, and community. The Folkvine project in Florida (and the work of the Florida Research Ensemble generally); the memory mapping work of Marlene Creates and Ernie Kroeger; the storymapping of First Nations experiences in small cities documented by the Small Cities CURA; Map Art and Diagram Art from the Surrealists to the Situationists to the work of contemporary artists; Sound Mapping, sonic geographies, and acoustic ecology research: these alternative approaches to mapping culture and community are helping to expand and refine the possibilities for mapping as a form of cultural inquiry.

The editors of Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry seek submissions that address cultural mapping in all its forms and applications. Abstracts and inquiries should be sent by March 30, 2012 to Dr. W.F. Garrett-Petts, Faculty of Arts, Thompson Rivers University: petts@tru.ca

Editors for the refereed book publication (to be published jointly by the Centro de Estudos Sociais at the University of Coimbra, Textual Studies in Canada and the Small Cities Community-University Research Alliance): David MacLennan, W.F. Garrett-Petts, and Nancy Duxbury.

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/