- University of Bristol, Education, Faculty Memberadd
- Cultural Heritage, Material Culture Studies, Ethnography, Urban Anthropology, Textiles, Pottery, and 11 moreMuseum Studies, Weaving, Museum Collection history, History of Textiles, Intangible Cultural Heritage (Culture), Heritage Studies, History and Memory, Cultural Anthropology, Museum and Heritage Studies, Textile Culture, and Eastern European Studiesedit
- Magda Buchczyk is an anthropologist and Junior Professor in Social Anthropology of Cultural Expressions at the Humbol... moreMagda Buchczyk is an anthropologist and Junior Professor in Social Anthropology of Cultural Expressions at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on material culture, heritage and knowledge production with ethnographic research on collections, making and learning.
Key research themes include collection ethnography and memory, intangible heritage and radical change, heritage politics and Cold War diplomacy, weaving and textile culture, UNESCO Learning Cities, and craft and uncertainty. Her ethnographic fieldwork focuses on Europe, predominantly Romania and the UK, and more recently, Italy, Germany and Poland.
She currently acts as a vice-chair of the TRACTS Cost Action (Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice).edit
Research Interests:
Collection development presents a major challenge for contemporary museums as part of wider efforts to address their changing societal role. This article considers what could be learned from a Berlin-based museum’s attempts to rethink its... more
Collection development presents a major challenge for contemporary museums as part of wider efforts to address their changing societal role. This article considers what could be learned from a Berlin-based museum’s attempts to rethink its collection as part of an institutional self-reflection. On its twentieth anniversary, the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) considered the blank spots within the collection. Focusing on how the MEK seeks to reshape the collection through creating a new policy and acquisition practice, the article demonstrates that collection development is enmeshed in complex institutional legacies, habits and future orientations. As numerous museums experience similar challenges regarding collection legacies, this article calls for making future-oriented collection development explicit. First, this includes a reflexive practice of accounting for the implicit futures incorporated within long-standing collection plotlines and institutional habits. Secondly, it necessitates reframing collection development as a bold, prefigurative practice, rather than just a form of corrective, preventative or anticipatory action. By developing prefigurative curatorial practice, museums could advance new approaches instead of being pushed and pulled by the past and the future. Learning to inhabit the future could transform the museums’ social role and their capacity for actively shaping desirable outcomes.
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Drawing on fieldwork in Bristol, UK, the article resituates the increasingly popular policy framing of a "learning city" within recent anthropological debates on urban political materiality. Using research findings from fieldwork... more
Drawing on fieldwork in Bristol, UK, the article resituates the increasingly popular policy framing of a "learning city" within recent anthropological debates on urban political materiality. Using research findings from fieldwork conducted in sites of informal and non-formal learning on the margins of a UNESCO Learning City, we argue for an ethnography that is attentive to the ways in which learning manifests itself in everyday life. Through three field sites-a community space, a bicycle workshop, and a contested heritage campaign-we demonstrate the significance of material culture, controversy, and care as constitutive of learning processes within urban life. Through these examples, we aim to reframe questions on the complexity of learning at a city scale as part of affect-driven knowledge and the material, embodied transmission of skill and everyday practice. By tracing how learning plays out in everyday life, we can begin to interrogate what happens beyond the neoliberal forms of educational governance, and the extent to which the everyday practices challenge or reinforce top-down formulations as well as potentially transforming forms of knowledge production.
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This article offers a fieldwork-based reflection on how the performance of craft is entangled with attempts to overcome uncertainty. Drawing on research with urban craft groups in a refugee drop-in and a community centre in the UK, I... more
This article offers a fieldwork-based reflection on how the performance of craft is entangled with attempts to overcome uncertainty. Drawing on research with urban craft groups in a refugee drop-in and a community centre in the UK, I explore how participants engage in textile making as part of their unsettled existence. This article reconsiders the importance of heterogeneous craft practices as ways of operating in a precarious environment, suggesting that in the face of adversity, craftsmanship can play a role in carving out spaces of possibility
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This paper uses Donna Haraway's metaphor of the cat’s cradle to explore how learning in the city can be understood as an entangled meshwork of social, material and discursive practices. Drawing on two years of ethnographic encounters in... more
This paper uses Donna Haraway's metaphor of the cat’s cradle to explore how learning in the city can be understood as an entangled meshwork of social, material and discursive practices. Drawing on two years of ethnographic encounters in the city with organisers of adult learning, conveners of protests, leaders of elite city institutions, refugees, longstanding inhabitants, artists, city farmers, community groups, parents and social activists, the chapter describes how a city’s learning ecology is deeply shaped by physical infrastructure, planning laws, transport systems and in particular by key local actors actively nurturing rich learning experiences. We conclude by arguing that creating a vibrant learning city will require investing in and supporting these key actors and working across education, planning, transport and land departments if issues of equity and access to learning opportunities are to be fully addressed.
Co-authored with community researchers: Liz Bishop, Helen Bolton, Zehra Haq, Jackie Gilbert, Gideon Thomas, Jessica Tomico, and Xiujuan Wang
Co-authored with community researchers: Liz Bishop, Helen Bolton, Zehra Haq, Jackie Gilbert, Gideon Thomas, Jessica Tomico, and Xiujuan Wang
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This article addresses the historical context of a museum collection of Romanian artifacts in light of British–Romanian diplomacy. The museum's holdings are unpacked through a study of the events that led to their acquisition in the... more
This article addresses the historical context of a museum collection of Romanian artifacts in light of British–Romanian diplomacy. The museum's holdings are unpacked through a study of the events that led to their acquisition in the 1950s. It is argued that the ethnographic investigation of the historical and political landscape in which the collection emerged reveals the importance of the collection’s performance on the Cold War cultural stage, where acts of exhibiting museum artifacts across the Iron Curtain served to create certain representations of the modern state. Particular attention is paid to the often‐overlooked European folk art collections residing in European ethnographic museums. The history of the Romanian collection held by the Horniman Museum of London (UK) demonstrates that an anthropological critique of these holdings can help explore the complex histories and the political relations that underpinned the movement and display of folk artifacts across the Iron Curtain. [Cold War, museum ethnography, state, Romania, Britain]
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Bristol, our home town, has a famous tower that stands on one of its highest points. Climbing up inside the narrow staircase in the dark, you suddenly come to an archway at the top that brings you out blinded into the light and to a... more
Bristol, our home town, has a famous tower that stands on one of its highest points. Climbing up inside the narrow staircase in the dark, you suddenly come to an archway at the top that brings you out blinded into the light and to a vision of the city spreading out beyond you: the parks, the river, the serried ranks of brightly coloured terraced houses climbing the many hills, the corporate headquarters by the docks, the trainlines snaking through the housing estates in the suburbs, the view out to the countryside beyond. From this perspective, it’s tempting to believe you can hold the city in the sweep of your hand as you reach out and draw it all in. As de Certeau (1984) observed, this elevated position is the vantage point from which plans can be made, blueprints drawn up for the city; top down, it gives the impression of a comprehensive and comprehensible view of the city. From this God’s eye view, however, the everyday, street-level behaviours that generate the actual lived experience of the city are invisible. The small acts, the everyday decisions, the repeated practices of short cuts and preferred strolls that produce the lived geography of the city remain out of sight. For those living in the city, seeking to build resources that support their own and others’ learning, the question is – how to make comprehensible the micro-practices that constitute the learning infrastructures that are being built? This tension between the top-down vision of the city planner and the lived experience of individuals actually navigating and making that city through everyday activities, as well as the conceptual and methodological challenges of exploring the everyday practices of learning, are the focus for this chapter.
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Although the idea of the learning city occupies a prominent place in the field of lifelong learning, it is still largely under-researched. The research note draws on an ongoing study in Bristol involving multi-sited ethnography, including... more
Although the idea of the learning city occupies a prominent place in the field of lifelong learning, it is still largely under-researched. The research note draws on an ongoing study in Bristol involving multi-sited ethnography, including participant observation, interviews and ethnographic encounters. In this research note, we argue that that using anthropological methods affords valuable insights into the relatively neglected aspects of urban learning within the international discourse surrounding learning cities. It can help to reveal the everyday practices through which the city affords learning and to explore how learners improvise and navigate the city.
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This article describes how artists, scholars and curators have used folkloric collections and exhibitions as tools to explore the relationship between tradition and innovation. Contemporary art practice has seen a growing interest toward... more
This article describes how artists, scholars and curators have used folkloric collections and exhibitions as tools to explore the relationship between tradition and innovation. Contemporary art practice has seen a growing interest toward the use of folkloric material. With this in mind, in our curatorial work on the Forging Folklore, Disrupting Archives exhibition, we experiment with new methods of ethnographic representation. The article highlights the importance of animating folkloric and traditional objects through experimentation with collaborative, participatory and visual approaches.
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Based on anthropological fieldwork within a museum collection, this article discusses the changing nature of the rural household in central Romania. Through a detailed examination of its interiors, it provides an understanding of local... more
Based on anthropological fieldwork within a museum collection, this article discusses the changing nature of the rural household in central Romania. Through a detailed examination of its interiors, it provides an understanding of local perspectives on traditional households. Tracing the historical process of undressing and remaking this space, the article highlights the shifting local attitudes toward domesticity and different sentiments toward the house voiced by source communities and museum professionals. It aims to illuminate the contrasting time-spaces in which rural households are embedded and to provide a context for rethinking this material in the museum setting.
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Ethnological scholarship developed in Romania often conceptualizes folk pottery as a community affair, focused around a selection of folk art centres where the craft is being practiced and transmitted. In this model, the maker is viewed... more
Ethnological scholarship developed in Romania often conceptualizes folk pottery as a community affair, focused around a selection of folk art centres where the craft is being practiced and transmitted. In this model, the maker is viewed as a locally specific bearer of family traditions and bearer of folk styles representative of a given ethnographic area.
Here, I challenge how museological perspectives on Romanian pottery underrepresent the diverse strategies of craft practice and the multiple social contexts in which artefacts are embedded. In order to highlight the complex nature of these craft communities, I explore the irregular landscape of contemporary practitioners of pottery; both those perceived as authorized folk artists and others, represented by the museum curators as makers of kitsch.
Here, I challenge how museological perspectives on Romanian pottery underrepresent the diverse strategies of craft practice and the multiple social contexts in which artefacts are embedded. In order to highlight the complex nature of these craft communities, I explore the irregular landscape of contemporary practitioners of pottery; both those perceived as authorized folk artists and others, represented by the museum curators as makers of kitsch.
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This article discusses the historical and social change associated with textiles in a rural setting in central Romania. Using ethnographic fieldwork with the Horniman Museum’s folk textile collection, it considers the transformation of... more
This article discusses the historical and social change associated with textiles in a rural setting in central Romania. Using ethnographic fieldwork with the Horniman Museum’s folk textile collection, it considers the transformation of traditional weaving in the source community. It highlights that the local perceptions of traditional fabrics are embedded in the narratives of practice and personhood. Weavers’ stories provide insights on the craftswomen’s adjustment to major historical transformations and ideas of modernity and femininity. This perspective sheds light on local values beyond fixed folk styles and traditional designs.
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As the discipline of anthropology has been utilising curatorial techniques to showcase fieldwork to a broader public, ethnographers have increasingly organised exhibitions within museums, art galleries, universities and community spaces.... more
As the discipline of anthropology has been utilising curatorial techniques to showcase fieldwork to a broader public, ethnographers have increasingly organised exhibitions within museums, art galleries, universities and community spaces. It has been argued that curated spaces are sites of feeling and imagination, and include the deployment and stimulation of emotional states (Blackman 2016, Butler and Lehrer 2016). If curated spaces "function as contact zones where affect is transmitted" (Fisher & Reckitt 2015), how does this inflect the practices of anthropological representation. What kind of disciplinary and affective dilemma do curatorial spaces expose?
This paper offers lessons from two exhibition projects to consider some of the issues posed by translating ethnographic projects into curatorial projects. Using examples of exhibitions organised within and beyond ethnographic museums, the paper explores the disciplinary and affective dilemma curatorial spaces can be infused with. These cases shed a light on how some affects could be provoked deliberately, others less consciously. They tell us about some of the ways in which meanings are mediated by complex emotive registers, their various effects in the decision-making process and the ways in which they redefine the relationships between the fieldworkers, curators and respondents in the making of anthropological knowledge.
This paper offers lessons from two exhibition projects to consider some of the issues posed by translating ethnographic projects into curatorial projects. Using examples of exhibitions organised within and beyond ethnographic museums, the paper explores the disciplinary and affective dilemma curatorial spaces can be infused with. These cases shed a light on how some affects could be provoked deliberately, others less consciously. They tell us about some of the ways in which meanings are mediated by complex emotive registers, their various effects in the decision-making process and the ways in which they redefine the relationships between the fieldworkers, curators and respondents in the making of anthropological knowledge.
Research Interests: Ethnography and Curating
We argue that by paying attention to the materiality of the learning city, we can grasp the ways in which the channelling structures of learning are embedded in the urban fabric and the social life of the city. Tracing of the... more
We argue that by paying attention to the materiality of the learning city, we can grasp the ways in which the channelling structures of learning are embedded in the urban fabric and the social life of the city.
Tracing of the constellation of learning institutions, devices and socialities in the fabric of the city could reveal the ways in which activities of the lively, urban learning infrastructure interlink with the lives of communities and urban inhabitants.
Tracing of the constellation of learning institutions, devices and socialities in the fabric of the city could reveal the ways in which activities of the lively, urban learning infrastructure interlink with the lives of communities and urban inhabitants.
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In the recent decades, one of the key mechanisms by which ideas of lifelong learning have been disseminated internationally, is that of the learning city. Learning Cities pool together resources to meet the learning needs of the residents... more
In the recent decades, one of the key mechanisms by which ideas of lifelong learning have been disseminated internationally, is that of the learning city. Learning Cities pool together resources to meet the learning needs of the residents and establish collaborations between educational, public, private, non-governmental and voluntary sectors to meet the social goals of inclusiveness and sustainable development. The UNESCO Learning Cities’ network constitutes an intersection between global and city-based practices aiming to unlock local capacity and embed global agendas within the urban fabric.
This paper presents a research-based perspective on the multiscale nature of the “actually existing” learning city. Based on primary research in Bristol, it demonstrates how lifelong learning activities are operating in the urban space within and outside the official framework of the Bristol Learning City and the UNESCO initiatives. By paying theoretical and methodological attention to the strategic city-wide initiatives and the localised aspects of lifelong learning, we uncover the local, regional and international imaginaries of lifelong learning. The research demonstrates that lifelong learning has to be understood in its actuality, in relation to everyday life and experiences of adaptation, emergence and change.
Moreover, this research also highlights that lifelong learning needs to be probed critically as a non-neutral field (Biesta 2013) and a situated mode of educational practice. In addition, the paper demonstrates that engaged multi-sited research can develop partnerships with stakeholders in order to develop new dialogue between actors and highlight a practice-based perspective on the models of lifelong learning, often constructed from particular standpoints.
This will enable us to build a more robust insight into how lifelong learning happens on the street and city-wide levels, generate new research agendas in the field and present new opportunities for policy makers and lifelong learning practitioners both internationally and locally.
This paper presents a research-based perspective on the multiscale nature of the “actually existing” learning city. Based on primary research in Bristol, it demonstrates how lifelong learning activities are operating in the urban space within and outside the official framework of the Bristol Learning City and the UNESCO initiatives. By paying theoretical and methodological attention to the strategic city-wide initiatives and the localised aspects of lifelong learning, we uncover the local, regional and international imaginaries of lifelong learning. The research demonstrates that lifelong learning has to be understood in its actuality, in relation to everyday life and experiences of adaptation, emergence and change.
Moreover, this research also highlights that lifelong learning needs to be probed critically as a non-neutral field (Biesta 2013) and a situated mode of educational practice. In addition, the paper demonstrates that engaged multi-sited research can develop partnerships with stakeholders in order to develop new dialogue between actors and highlight a practice-based perspective on the models of lifelong learning, often constructed from particular standpoints.
This will enable us to build a more robust insight into how lifelong learning happens on the street and city-wide levels, generate new research agendas in the field and present new opportunities for policy makers and lifelong learning practitioners both internationally and locally.
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The conception of the learning city is increasingly promoted in the fields of lifelong learning and international policy through UNESCO, EU and OECD programmes. The framework of the learning city emphasises the proliferation of learning... more
The conception of the learning city is increasingly promoted in the fields of lifelong learning and international policy through UNESCO, EU and OECD programmes. The framework of the learning city emphasises the proliferation of learning and innovation on individual, community and city-wide levels as well as the development of human capital, competitiveness and economic growth. Recently, however, the ideas of lifelong learning and of the learning city have recently been problematized in terms of their connections to neoliberal paradigms and links with power and knowledge (Fejes and Nicoll 2008). Critics pointed to the rhetoric of the learning city vision as an uncritical rendering of the ideological froth (Harvey, 2003) of neoliberal transformations of the knowledge economy (Plumb et al 2007).
This paper, based on a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork of the city of Bristol and the Bristol Learning City program, provides a critical understanding of urban learning in an anthropological perspective. This research combined participant observation and participatory research in the streets, community centers, urban protests, informal learning activities and conference rooms around Bristol. Through a discussion of the multiple arenas of the learning city, in particular the ordinary domains and alternative learning practices, it is demonstrated that learning sits at the intersection of neoliberal practices and spaces of contestation and possibility. An insight into mundane urban learning infrastructures as well as emerging learning instances of dissent allows us to overcome the essentialized and individualistic frameworks of the learning city.
This paper, based on a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork of the city of Bristol and the Bristol Learning City program, provides a critical understanding of urban learning in an anthropological perspective. This research combined participant observation and participatory research in the streets, community centers, urban protests, informal learning activities and conference rooms around Bristol. Through a discussion of the multiple arenas of the learning city, in particular the ordinary domains and alternative learning practices, it is demonstrated that learning sits at the intersection of neoliberal practices and spaces of contestation and possibility. An insight into mundane urban learning infrastructures as well as emerging learning instances of dissent allows us to overcome the essentialized and individualistic frameworks of the learning city.
This paper will explore the case of Horezu pottery in relationship with craft continuity, history, and heritage. Through an ethnographic study of this craft practice, I will investigate the ways in which heritage narratives inflect the... more
This paper will explore the case of Horezu pottery in relationship with craft continuity, history, and heritage. Through an ethnographic study of this craft practice, I will investigate the ways in which heritage narratives inflect the production, marketing, and consumption of craft objects. I will argue that heritage practices have a profound influence on the process of making, the resulting artifact, but also on the identities of the craft practitioners.
In 2012, a Romanian pottery centre was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and is widely considered as one of the emblematic sites of traditional craft production. An anthropological investigation of the site demonstrates that often interpretations of the site by scholarly and heritage institutions fail to acknowledge the influence of historical changes on the centre, in particular in the period of state socialism when the pottery’s heritage was redefined and brought into practice through the creation of state cooperatives, craft fairs, and exhibitionary practices. I will examine how current pottery makers draw on craft models of the past to develop practice and craft identities today and demonstrate the stories that objects can tell about the temporalities and taskscapes of contemporary potters and evoke the emic experience of material history. Examining how practitioners mediate, appropriate, and negotiate the frameworks of practice becomes a way to rethink this craft practice, its past and future.
Told in their ateliers, craftsmen’s stories of their experience of history, notions of time, and labour vary in significant ways from the authorized heritage discourse, cultural management programs, and narratives evoked in markets and museums. Stories collected in potters’ ateliers and houses show how lived history can shed light on a more tangible social symbolism and the categories guiding practice and framing situated knowledge. By showing the daily experience and metaphors of production (through techniques and patterns) and listening to voices on social categories, activities, instruments and rhythms of work, our view of the potters’ taskscapes becomes wider and interwoven into the fabric of discontinuities and tensions as significant as the official historical scripts and stories of harmonious transmission. The interpretations from below show that just as much as people make specific pots, the ceramic objects as well as their stories and spaces, make people.
The last part of our paper will situate the work of the potter within the wider forces of new heritage infrastructures and practices on the ground. Folk pottery production emerges as a heterogeneous taskscape involving negotiations of meanings and identities as well as spatial, narrative, and material practices. The case of Horezu demonstrates the contradictions between heritage narratives that privilege traditional craft skills entangled with the ideas of authenticity, continuity, and rural Arcadia with contemporary craft practices and objects and the complex histories in which they emerged.
In 2012, a Romanian pottery centre was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and is widely considered as one of the emblematic sites of traditional craft production. An anthropological investigation of the site demonstrates that often interpretations of the site by scholarly and heritage institutions fail to acknowledge the influence of historical changes on the centre, in particular in the period of state socialism when the pottery’s heritage was redefined and brought into practice through the creation of state cooperatives, craft fairs, and exhibitionary practices. I will examine how current pottery makers draw on craft models of the past to develop practice and craft identities today and demonstrate the stories that objects can tell about the temporalities and taskscapes of contemporary potters and evoke the emic experience of material history. Examining how practitioners mediate, appropriate, and negotiate the frameworks of practice becomes a way to rethink this craft practice, its past and future.
Told in their ateliers, craftsmen’s stories of their experience of history, notions of time, and labour vary in significant ways from the authorized heritage discourse, cultural management programs, and narratives evoked in markets and museums. Stories collected in potters’ ateliers and houses show how lived history can shed light on a more tangible social symbolism and the categories guiding practice and framing situated knowledge. By showing the daily experience and metaphors of production (through techniques and patterns) and listening to voices on social categories, activities, instruments and rhythms of work, our view of the potters’ taskscapes becomes wider and interwoven into the fabric of discontinuities and tensions as significant as the official historical scripts and stories of harmonious transmission. The interpretations from below show that just as much as people make specific pots, the ceramic objects as well as their stories and spaces, make people.
The last part of our paper will situate the work of the potter within the wider forces of new heritage infrastructures and practices on the ground. Folk pottery production emerges as a heterogeneous taskscape involving negotiations of meanings and identities as well as spatial, narrative, and material practices. The case of Horezu demonstrates the contradictions between heritage narratives that privilege traditional craft skills entangled with the ideas of authenticity, continuity, and rural Arcadia with contemporary craft practices and objects and the complex histories in which they emerged.
Research Interests:
Are traditional objects necessarily defined by standardised conventional aesthetic style? Are functions of such objects fixed in time and place? Based on historical research and anthropological fieldwork in Romania, this paper explores... more
Are traditional objects necessarily defined by standardised conventional aesthetic style? Are functions of such objects fixed in time and place? Based on historical research and anthropological fieldwork in Romania, this paper explores the complex interactions embedded in vernacular objects. Although defined as markers of local style and traditional everyday life, museum artefacts can often carry stories of rupture, transformation and contested aesthetics. The case studies of vernacular artefacts highlight the tangled nature of aesthetic and technological choices through which these objects emerge. I present some of the contrasting examples of makers following regional aesthetic traditions and those who choose to produce transgressive, outsider objects of differing function and design. I will demonstrate that these transitional acts can remove such makers out of the community of legitimate producers but also can provide opportunities for aesthetic experimentation.
The paper aims to dislocate the objects from their regional setting. Rather than mediating the lifestyles of ahistorical communities, rural material culture tells a story of performative actions as well as multiple negotiations between the makers of the objects, the state and international cultural diplomacy.
The paper aims to dislocate the objects from their regional setting. Rather than mediating the lifestyles of ahistorical communities, rural material culture tells a story of performative actions as well as multiple negotiations between the makers of the objects, the state and international cultural diplomacy.
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Collaborative anthropological research within heritage institutions has been attracting substantive funding in recent years, but the social life and the effects of these collaborations have rarely been academically scrutinized... more
Collaborative anthropological research within heritage institutions has been attracting substantive funding in recent years, but the social life and the effects of these collaborations have rarely been academically scrutinized (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2007). These collaborations are thought to facilitate new forms of knowledge practices and models of interdisciplinary partnership (Peers and Brown 2003). But to what extent do practices of 'revisiting' enable a wider impact, and allow more voices to be heard through the exhibition of artefacts?
We discuss the outcome of our PhD research project designed as an interdisciplinary reinterpretation of a Romanian collection in London. The examination of networks of researchers, museum curators and diplomatic institutions demonstrates the tangled nature of the exhibitionary symbiosis. We suggest that the museum holdings have accrued a history of shifting partnerships and representational agendas. Meanwhile, the exhibition discourse does not bring forth these discrete intentionalities; within the setting of museum rhetoric, the objects are made to speak with one voice.
We describe the position of ethnographers working within the current project and the negotiations of practice and power in which this work is situated. The recent incentives for collaborative projects coincide with a context of shortages of funding for both museums and the academic world, which entail an individualistic and competitive approach to knowledge production. How can these contradictory modes of behaving within the discipline of anthropology be accommodated? Such collaboration needs to be unpacked and understood within a wider spectrum of relations (Golding and Modest 2013).
We discuss the outcome of our PhD research project designed as an interdisciplinary reinterpretation of a Romanian collection in London. The examination of networks of researchers, museum curators and diplomatic institutions demonstrates the tangled nature of the exhibitionary symbiosis. We suggest that the museum holdings have accrued a history of shifting partnerships and representational agendas. Meanwhile, the exhibition discourse does not bring forth these discrete intentionalities; within the setting of museum rhetoric, the objects are made to speak with one voice.
We describe the position of ethnographers working within the current project and the negotiations of practice and power in which this work is situated. The recent incentives for collaborative projects coincide with a context of shortages of funding for both museums and the academic world, which entail an individualistic and competitive approach to knowledge production. How can these contradictory modes of behaving within the discipline of anthropology be accommodated? Such collaboration needs to be unpacked and understood within a wider spectrum of relations (Golding and Modest 2013).
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Co-curated with Gabriela Nicolescu and Alexandra Urdea
Constance Howard Gallery, London
1. May 2014 - 15. July 2014
Constance Howard Gallery, London
1. May 2014 - 15. July 2014
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Co-curated with Fiona Kerlogue, Gabriela Nicolescu and Alexandra Urdea
04 Oct. 2014 - 18 Sept. 2016
Horniman Museum, London
04 Oct. 2014 - 18 Sept. 2016
Horniman Museum, London
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CFP for "Constructing Solidarities through Historical Traces" panel, which will be held at the IUAES 2019 Inter-Congress „World Solidarities” on August 27-31, 2019, Poznan, Poland
Deadline for abstracts: 15 February 2019
Deadline for abstracts: 15 February 2019