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- Convenors:
-
Ella Johansson
(Uppsala University)
Paweł Lewicki (University of Pittsburgh)
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- Stream:
- Material culture and museums
- Location:
- VG 2.103
- Start time:
- 28 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This session explores the glass wall as both material and metaphoric boundary. It can stand for a cultural borders that is transparent, and yet definite and hard to cross. How do these boundaries impact our practices and forms of dwelling? How does transparency affect our visions and strategies?
Long Abstract:
Walls of glass are a common feature of modern architecture. In work places and were the public encounters various administrative systems; at reception desks; in the emergency and triage room; ticket offices and meeting room in the office landscape as well as restaurant displaying its kitchen. A "glass wall" and a "glass ceiling" is also a metaphor for cultural borders that are transparent, and yet definite and hard to cross. It can express the frustration of groups or individuals not being able to getting access, or to be "at home" in the bounded world behind the screen. It also expresses the invisibility of the causes of the exclusion, which are often connected to class, gender, ethnicity and migration. Are glass walls due to a lack of cultural competence or are there other reasons? How is one identified by the gate keepers of the boundary? Can one learn to understand, take action and transgress? The wall is thus also a cultural mirror. Yet they are also possible to see beyond and can unfold people´s visions and projects.
This session explores the glass wall in its aspects as both material and metaphoric boundary. How are glass walls and ceilings built up in order to expose or enclose vulnerable forms of existence, or to mark a safe place to observe others or to display power and control? What is made visible and what is concealed by glass walls and ceilings? How do these boundaries impact our practices and forms of dwelling?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Martha Norkunas (Middle Tennessee State University)
Paper short abstract:
How do African Americans in the U.S. narrate home? Is it tied to a dwelling, a community of support, feelings of safety or belonging? What walls of glass constitute the boundaries of home? This paper explores concepts of home developed within systems of racial oppression.
Paper long abstract:
How do people of color in the United States narrate the concept of home? Is it tied to a physical dwelling, a community of support, feelings of safety, or ideas about belonging to a place or a nation? What are the boundaries of the place of home? What are the boundaries of the idea of home? Based on life history interviews conducted over a five-year period with African Americans in Austin, Texas this paper explores the differing boundaries of home developed within systems of racial oppression. I will reflect on narrators' experiences of "bounded worlds" within a city they called home and look at their sense of the nation as home, even when that nation had a long history of institutional, transgenerational racism. The walls of glass metaphor is particularly apt as narrators so often looked over and through the boundaries that strove to exclude them from various aspects of the public and private spheres. It is also a provocative metaphor to use to think about ideas of the home, with its implications of privacy and belonging. Is the home a place apart from racialized exclusion or is it a product of that exclusion? What is visible inside the boundaries of home, and whose gaze is allowed to see?
Gareth Hamilton (University of Latvia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper, based on (partly auto)ethnographic experience, documents and analyses the ‘glass walls’ which are either deliberately or inadvertently erected to hamper integration of ‘foreign’ academics within the university and academic system of a former Soviet – now EU – country.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, based on (partly auto)ethnographic experience, documents and analyses the 'glass walls' which are either deliberately or inadvertently erected to hamper integration of 'foreign' academics within the university and academic system of a former Soviet - now EU - country. Based on the case of Latvia, it attempts to explore how linguistic and nationalistic politics/policies and practices impact upon the university's and state's aims of attracting academics from abroad, taking note of the ironic situation where many Latvian academic talents have moved abroad. It does so by examining, firstly, Latvia's language policies (created in the presence of a large ethno-linguistic minority) and their symbolic, exclusionary aims. Second, it shows how such stated aims build transparent yet immovable and seemingly inflexible boundaries within a complex bureaucratic structures which aim to attract 'foreigners' but through certain practices exclude the very persons which are targeted by such actions. This is based on the experience of applying for funding schemes and the modalities involved, as well insufficient support for language learning for 'foreign' academics, plus issues which apparently transparent language policies cause for tenure track positions despite official support for non-'state language' taught courses and the drive for non-native language competence. Third, it shows ways in which EU funding of certain programmes in research and teaching challenge this 'glass wall', means of negotiating such boundaries (including the gatekeepers involved), and suggests ways in which integration but maintaining the importance of the 'state language' can be achieved.
Catherine McCullagh (Heriot-Watt University)
Paper short abstract:
Co-curation transgresses boundaries and reveals blockades in diverse heritage dwellings. This first phase research assessment considers collaborative heritage interpretation and management as a cultural looking glass for communities envisioning sustainable futures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents first findings from my PhD project, commenced in November 2016. Aiming to increase visibility and access to Orkney and Shetland's maritime heritages, my practice-based research includes co-curating a virtual learning and exhibition environment. Through this portal the archipelagos - currently imagined as romantically remote - are 're-viewed' as maritime communicants; cultural mirrors through which shifting global concepts of 'peripheries' and 'centres', 'insiders' and 'outsiders' are regarded.
Reflecting heritage's participative turn, this co-curation transgresses boundaries and reveals blockades between cultural 'authenticity' and living tradition and between digital and embodied experiences. This early research phase assessment considers the constraints and freedoms encountered through collaborative interpretation and management of tangible and intangible heritage once set adrift and now dispersed throughout various community dwellings including museums, boat sheds, marine environments and households. Sharing findings from encounters facilitated throughout these settings, I aim to identify the visible and opaque dialogues between the diverse 'inhabitants' in the co-curation process. These include makers, museum curators, vocational and avocational sea-farers, island dwellers and buoyant visitors, 'objects of the sea' and myself; the researcher.
Additionally, I am opening a window onto questions arising out of this research launch. Is unlocking the glass cases of the 'Authorised Heritage Discourse Museum' a valid process for generating communities' creative and critical responses to fragility. What can we learn about the role of heritage as a mirror to communities' processes of entanglement, exclusivity, specificity and cohesion? Might heritage co-curation offer a transparent, empirical model for envisioning sustainable futures?
Anne-Sofie Hjemdahl (Telemark Research Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the practice of reconstructing skulls into hyper-realistic faces, and enact skeletons of the past as individual and bodily “monuments” exposed behind transparent walls of glass in archaeological museums. What are the relations between the bodily presence, the agency of the glass and archaeological knowledge production?
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the practice of reconstructing skulls into hyper-realistic faces, enact skeletons of the past as individual and bodily “monuments” and then expose them to the audience behind transparent walls of glass in archaeological museums. The procedure, called forensic art, is to scan and copy skulls and build them up as completed faces with muscle, skin and hair. The result make it possible to identify and present them to the audience as three-dimensional people. As such, the audience are supposed to meet the individuals of the past: “face to face” at the same time as they are covered and framed with glass walls. Hence, these bodies dwell behind glass walls.
In this paper, I will focus on the relation between the bodily presence of the reconstructions, archaeological knowledge production and the glass as both seems to protect and expose the bodies. The bodily presence behind the glass raises question about how the people of the past are brought into contemporary culture and what kind of existence and status they are given. The tension between knowledge production and knowledge communication is central and questions such as: how are these practices involved in archaeological production of knowledge - and what kind of work is the bodies and the glass meant to do within the archaeological museum, becomes significant.
Inspired by critical museology and actor-network theory I will focus upon practices and the agency of things. Further; I will relate my questions to archaeological exhibitions in Norway and Sweden, where human remains from the stone age have been reconstructed and put on display.