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- Convenors:
-
Amy Johnstone
(University of Glasgow)
Aimee Joyce (St Andrews University)
Vindhya Buthpitiya (University of St Andrews)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- G4
- Sessions:
- Friday 28 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Our panel brings together anthropologists and museum practitioners to explore exhibition as a pedagogic approach. We explore how producing creative public exhibitions offers new opportunities for understanding ethnography, and engaging with complex global entanglements with learners.
Long Abstract:
Anthropology and museums have an entangled history as much at odds with each other as they have agreed. Teaching this history, particularly connections between museums and broader systems of oppression, is a vital part of teaching about collection and display of material cultures. The practical side of designing and organising an exhibition of material culture has received less critical pedagogical attention.
This panel seeks to explore opportunities for teaching and learning arising when exhibition is used as a creative practice that brings together techniques of exhibition from museums, galleries, and contemporary art, and applies them to anthropological research questions. In using exhibition as a model for learning, questions about what it means to conduct anthropological research emerge, and new solutions to these questions must be found. The inherent collaboration involved in exhibition design has potential not only to draw on critical models of learning, but also to question those models by asking learners to consider where gaps in knowledge making are and how they are filled.
The panel covers a wide range of teaching that uses exhibition as a pedagogic approach to explore the potential for exhibition to engage with complex global issues, polycrises, and to engage students in both critique of representational paradigms within anthropology. It also offers a pathway to explore through experimentation how artistic, collaborative and other exhibition practices can facilitate learning. The panel will offer an opportunity for both theoretical and practical discussion around the challenges and opportunities that arise through exhibition as a pedagogic approach.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 28 June, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Children’s explorations of the world are increasingly marginalized by societal politics as well as shifted to virtual worlds by using media. This raises anthropological questions on children’s bodily learning. The paper focuses bodily learning in museum exhibitions on the basis of research data.
Paper long abstract:
Increasingly institutionalized childhoods within tightening societal “temporal politics” (Allemann-Ghionda 2009) marginalize children’s independent physical explorations of the world. These physical explorations used to be an integral part of historical childhoods (f. e. Muchow & Muchow 2012 [1935]). In conjunction with increasing media exposure through digital technologies, children’s own explorations of the world are increasingly ‘translocated’ to virtual worlds in “digital childhoods” (Danby et al. 2018). This opens up questions in historical as well as in educational anthropology, particularly concerning bodily learning. Here, the paper focuses museum exhibitions and children. Since especially younger children use their bodies and all senses to explore the world, the paper explores how physical interactions of children with ‘object-ecologies’ in museum exhibitions may promote the “sting of experience” (Bachelard 2011, 70) to encourage independent bodily explorations and appropriations of the world. The paper discusses this on the basis of empirical material.
Selected Literature:
Allemann-Ghionda, C. (2009). Ganztagsschule im europäischen Vergleich. Zeitpolitiken modernisieren – durch Vergleich Standards setzen? [All-day school in European comparisons. Modernizing temporal politics – setting standards by comparison?] - In: Stecher, L., Allemann-Ghionda, C., Helsper, W., Klieme, E. (eds.): Ganztägige Bildung und Betreuung [All-day education and care]. Weinheim: Beltz, 190–208.
Bachelard, G. (2011). La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Paris: Vrin.
Danby, S. J., Fleer, M., Davidson, Chr. & Hatzigianni, M. (eds.) (2018). Digital Childhoods. Technologies and Children’s Everyday Lives. Singapore: Springer.
Muchow, M. & Muchow, H. H. (2012 [1935]). Der Lebensraum des Großstadtkindes [The lifeworld of the city child]. Weinheim: Beltz/Juventa.
Paper short abstract:
This research delves into the role of art exhibitions in interpreting decolonised history, focusing on Indonesian museums. It emphasises their potential to engage with global issues and examines methods to convey historical narratives, highlighting art's power for learning and interpretation.
Paper long abstract:
This research examines the pivotal role of art exhibitions in assisting interpretations of decolonised history, specifically focusing on the correlation between artworks and artefacts exhibited in Indonesian museums, private and public, and ongoing efforts and emphasising the practical aspects of designing and organising exhibitions programs and their potential to engage with complex global issues such as decolonisation —the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of exhibitions' programs and the educational impact of these initiatives. Indonesian museums have progressively incorporated education resources as handouts for educators and formed partnerships with educational institutions to attend public discussions with artists and discipline experts. These attempts have built pathways for collaborative learning and redefining the historical meanings of the exhibition's audiences. This study also accentuates the evolving landscape of decolonisation, particularly within postcolonial countries like Indonesia. Through case studies, we scrutinise the methods employed by these art exhibitions to convey historical narratives, giving meaning-making opportunities for audiences within educational frames, fostering critical decolonised thinking skills and influencing the appreciation and preservation of marginalised histories. This research underscores art's potential as a powerful tool for historical interpretation and education by addressing the associated challenges and ethical considerations.
Paper short abstract:
Through the case study of the exhibition “Liangdeng: Notes from the Field”, this paper discusses how artistic exhibition practices can impact anthropological learning and understanding ethnography by creating an embodied, multi-sensory installation and becoming a continually evolving site itself.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to explore the ways in which contemporary art exhibitions can facilitate anthropological learning through the case study of “Liangdeng: Notes from the Field”. Held in 2019 in Beijing, China, this exhibition foregrounds a mountainous Miao village in rural China by showcasing the work of artist Huang Yugang (b. 1980), who has been residing in the village, working as an ethnographer and painting there since 2003. Additionally, it incorporates an entire piece of farmland in the gallery hall, transforming the white-cube space into an immersive, live installation that continuously triggers people’s embodied experience and imagination of 'the rural'.
Based on first-hand materials obtained from participant observation and interviews, as well as from my own working experience as the executive curator of the exhibition, this paper examines how anthropological knowledge of a particular place and its indigenous community is constructed, conveyed and perceived through artistic practices in the museum. In particular, it investigates how soil is used creatively and experienced sensorially in exhibition settings. By unfolding the multiple layers of soil as a material entity, an organic component of the surroundings, and an artwork, this paper argues that the learning potential of the exhibition is not only contained by the multi-sensory environment, but constantly generated in the evolving real scene it creates. It is also in this aspect that this paper attempts to propose a temporal perspective and consider the exhibition as a relational process that continues to have effect over time instead of an ended product.
Paper short abstract:
This paper introduces "Beware: Children," an action-research exhibition held in Italy (2003-2022), showing 150 global street signs. It explores how anthropology is learned in educational contexts where the exhibit also served as an arena for ethnographic research.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on participatory action research in anthropology of education. It discusses the ethnographic case of the exhibit “Beware: Children”, held in eighty-six primary and secondary schools in Italy between 2003 and 2022.
“Beware: children” refers to the street signs found near school buildings designed to warn drivers to slow down and proceed with caution. This article focuses on what can be learned when street signs of this type, used in different countries and continents, are examined and analysed in depth. Featuring 150 images referencing the “Beware: children” sign, the exhibition takes a cross-cultural approach and adheres to a pedagogical itinerary informed by the critical observation of images.
The paper questions how anthropology is learned in education contexts, contexts in which the exhibition also functioned as an arena for ethnographic research. Participants, including children, educators, and guides, generated their own explanations of their educational influences. “Beware: children” was not devised as a group of images to be viewed, however, but rather as a workshop in which visitors could interact with the object-images and investigate the extent to which reality can lie ‘behind’ a single street sign.