Conceived in relation to a wider field of scholarship that has in the last decades interrogated the role of museums in a postcolonial and postsocialist context, the project’s main premise is to consider museums as loci of memory and heritage, but also as fundamentally political places, where the relationships between the past, the present, and the future of a society are forged. It aims to consider a series of topical questions to current museum practice: What is the relationship between the postcolonial-era museum and the “source” communities of the objects exposed? How do/ can post-colonial museums deal with the legacy of the colonial past? What interactions exist between the colonial archives and current artistic practices?

Moreover, the research will adopt and develop the abundant post-colonial analysis of museums to the research context of problematic museum collections in Eastern Europe. How can post-colonial studies help understand museums in the post cold-war era? Can similar practices be observed in these museums as they deal with very different, difficult pasts?

The aim of the group is to open the possibility of a comparison between the case studies undertaken by each of the six members of the team, including the two associated doctoral students. Studies already concern the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the British Museum in London, the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the Institute of the National Museums of Congo in Kinshasa, the Iziko Museums of South Africa, and several national and international networks and associations of museum professionals.

Call for Applications:
2 Project Associates (PhD Students) “Museums and Controversial Collections”
Deadline December 15th, 2015

Events within the Project:

-Doctoral Winter School in Urban Anthropology:
Heritage-making, Uses and Museumification of the Past in Relationship to Nation-building
Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town, 27 July – 9 August 2017

Call for Applications (Deadline 15 April)
Program

-Seminar:
Rewriting the Colonial Past: Contemporary Challenges of Museum Collections
The Maurice Halbwachs Centre (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Ecole Normale Supérieure), Paris, November 2016 – May 2017
Seminar webpage: enseignements-2016.ehess.fr

-International conference:
What do Contentious Objects Want? Political, Epistemic and Artistic Cultures of Return
The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Florence, Italy, 21 – 22 October, 2016

Call for Papers
Program

-Workshop:
Reluctant heritage: Revisiting museums and memory sites in Central and Eastern Europe in a transnational perspective
Le Centre Régional Francophone de Recherches Avancées en Sciences Sociales (CEREFREA)
Bucharest, 4-5 November 2016

Call for Papers

-Doctoral Summer School in Urban Anthropology:
Heritage-making, Uses and Museumification of the Past in Relationship to Nation-building
French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA), Istanbul, Turkey, 26 June – 9 July 2016

Program

-Conference:
Places of Amnesia: An Interdisciplinary perspective on forgotten pasts
University of Cambridge, 5-6 April 2016

Program